minorthreat |

We have gone demented. Two Britons are or were (not very) ill from flu. “This could really explode,” intones a reporter for BBC News. “London warned: it’s here,” cries the Evening Standard. Fear is said to be spreading “like a Mexican wave”. It “could affect” three-quarters of a million Britons. It “could cost” three trillion dollars.

The BBC calls it a “potentially terrible virus”, but any viral infection is potentially terrible. Flu makes you feel ill. You should take medicine and rest. You will then get well again, unless you are very unlucky or have some complicating condition.

In Mexico, 2,000 people have been diagnosed as suffering swine flu. Some 150 of them have died, though there is said to be no pathological indication of all these deaths being linked to the new flu strain.

Nobody anywhere else in the world has died from this infection and only a handful have the new strain confirmed, most in America and almost all after returning from Mexico.

The risk of catching swine flu must be millions to one. Words such as possibly, potentially, could or might should be avoided. They are unspecific qualifiers and open to exaggeration.

During the BSE scare of 1995-7, grown men with medical degrees predicted doom, terrifying ministers into mad politician disease. The scientists’ hysteria, that BSE “has the potential to infect up to 10 million Britons”.

This science-based insanity was repeated during the Sars outbreak of 2003, to have “a 25% chance of killing tens of millions”. The press duly headlined a plague “worse than Aids”. Not one Briton died.

In 2006 with avian flu, a scientist named John Oxford declared that “it will be the first pandemic of the 21st century”. The WHO issued a statement that “one in four Britons could die“. The media went berserk, with interviewers asking why the government did not close all schools “to prevent up to 50,000 deaths”.

Meanwhile a real pestilence, MRSA and C difficile, was taking hold in hospitals. It was suppressed by the medical profession because it appeared that they themselves might be to blame. These diseases have played a role in thousands of deaths in British hospitals – the former a reported 1,652 and the latter 8,324 in 2007 alone.

MRSA and C difficile are not like swine flu, an opportunity for public figures to scare and posture and spend money. They are diseases for which the government is to blame. They claim no headlines and no Cobra priority. Their sufferers must crawl away and die in silence.