Joyce McMillan: Blind panic over flu is symptom of social decay

Published on Friday 24 July 2009 21:50

HOW are you feeling today, gentle reader? Bit of a sore throat and a sniffle?

A few aches and pains? Well, I don't want to worry you, but there's a faint chance you might have swine flu, the illness currently sweeping the globe in what both the World Health Organisation and the British government define as a pandemic.

Of course, if you have any sense, and you do not suffer from an illness which compromises your immune system, then you won't be very worried anyway.

The current global death toll from swine flu is between 700 and 1,000, a figure which must make it one of the most benign viruses ever identified by international health organisations.

Deaths in Britain currently total about 30, which makes the virus so far about 200 times less dangerous than the average winter seasonal flu epidemic, and guarantees that, as you go about your business over the next month, you are about ten times more likely to die in a road accident than to die of flu.

There are reasons, of course, why public health professionals have to remain vigilant: the virus is a new one, and its future development is unpredictable. But the fact remains that, for most of those infected by it, this form of flu is currently comparable to a heavy cold and tends to disappear within days. Even those more severely affected and forced to take to their beds have a 99 per cent chance of recovering fully within a week or two, and the rate of infection is so low that even the immediate families of victims often fail to contract the illness.

So how on earth has this minor epidemic come to dominate our headlines over the past few weeks, to the point where many parents of young children are now seriously anxious about how to respond?

The culprits are many, of course. The World Health Organisation seems to have moved with unusual speed to declare a "pandemic", without making any assessment of whether the virus was serious enough to warrant that kind of language.

The government – frightened in the past by more serious threats, such as the Sars outbreak of 2003 – has put in place an elaborate epidemic response structure, which is both eager to test its systems and naturally inclined to emphasise the presence of risk, however slight.

Various official and semi-official voices have come out with conflicting pieces of silly advice, notably the one (perhaps apocryphal) about women avoiding becoming pregnant until the epidemic is over.

And finally, as ever, there are the media; for there's no denying the toxic interaction, in this case, between a commercially stressed media desperate for headlines and a public health system so terrified of being accused of complacency or inaction that it prefers to join the popular media in frightening the public out of its wits.

But in the end, a public whose wits were in good order would not be so easily scared by the latest panic, whatever its object. We're told often enough that our society here in Britain is something of a psychological basket case these days, grievously unequal in both opportunities and outcome, crudely materialistic in a way that delivers little happiness, and liable to increasingly irrational bouts of rage and panic. And if ever you wanted evidence that there is some truth in this diagnosis, then you could do worse than consider the response of at least some citizens to the swine flu threat.

Most people, of course, are bracing up and getting on with their lives in a sensible fashion.

But who are these credulous millions who, as soon as the English swine flu helpline opened, piled on to the lines in such numbers that the whole system instantly collapsed? Who are these newspaper readers who are so easily bamboozled by any number with a couple of zeroes on the end? Who were the owners of the dozens of worried voices queuing up for information on last week's Radio 4 swine-flu phone-in? At least half of them, or so it seemed, simply had time on their hands, and were looking for somewhere to focus a vague but insistent sense of foreboding.

And this, surely, is the point: that the psychological resilience and common sense of ordinary people in the UK is now being increasingly undermined by the damaging levels of insecurity we are expected to withstand, day in and day out.

In the past year, we have been subjected to a terrifying litany of economic disaster, which – in a wholly arbitrary way – threatens the livelihoods of millions.

Now, we are being told that the only solution to this disaster lies in savage cuts to the public services that help to cushion our sense of vulnerability and provide our safety net in tough times.

And at the same time we are gradually becoming aware of an evermore convincing body of evidence that suggests our whole lifestyle is unsustainable in the longer term. This is at a time when no political party seems remotely capable of uniting us in a journey towards a new kind of society.

So in the end it's perhaps small wonder that an increasing proportion of us are beginning to lose the plot and panic over things that are barely worth our attention. It's more manageable, after all, to fret about a swine flu outbreak that hardly threatens us at all than to try to address the structural weaknesses of our whole economic system, and the society it has spawned.

At best, swine flu is a metaphor for our deep, uneasy sense of impending disaster. At worst, it's a distraction from more serious matters. But either way, our society is giving yet another spectacular demonstration of its growing inability to deal rationally with risk; perhaps because the real risks we face are so formidable that no-one can deal with them at all.