Posted by
Andrews on Wednesday, April 29, 2009 10:11:30 PM
I know that it sounds scary, and newscasters are doing everything they can to encourage listeners to misunderstand the word, but "pandemic" means nothing more than that a disease has world-wide scope. In other words, we already have athlete's foot and syphilis pandemics. I know many people are frightened about the swine flu, but publishing headlines about it being declared a "pandemic" and then mentioning 1918 does nothing to encourage rational understanding.
First, 1918 was a different time. Streets still filled regularly with horse feces in 1918. More people died of typhus and cholera in the Great War than of bullets, antibiotics were largely unknown. That is a very different world. Even were the same flu to reappear, we would not suffer the same deaths, as we have better treatment of opportunistic infections. Secondary infections such as pneumonia would never cause the deaths they did then.
Second, just because a disease has spread, and caused some deaths in third world nations (sorry, but Mexico is still basically third world when it comes to health provision), that is no more of a prediction of doom than the prior spread of SARS or bird flu was. The swine flu does seem to be a bit more contagious than the bird flu, but I still have a suspicion that it will prove as much of an overreaction as the bird flu hype was.
Then again, this isn't a post about my thoughts on the disease, but on the uselessness of creating needless fear by overplaying the poorly understood term "pandemic". Please, newscasters, either explain what the term means or don't use it. There is nothing to be gained by creating unnecessary worries by abusing terms few (including many reporters) understand.
POSTSCRIPT
It is a page about the bird flu, but
this site does provide an interesting insight on why the 1918 pandemic is a bad model for understanding mdoern influenze outbreaks.