There are generally only five groups of people who trumpet the potential threat of a severe influenza pandemic that H5N1 poses. Those are governments, some scientists, the media, the World Health Organization (WHO), and the cyber flu community, otherwise known as "the flu obsessed" or "Flubies".
Interestingly, those groups encompass three important segments of a society: government, media, and the citizenry.
I get into degrees of "snit" when I read someone's post on one of the flu forums that bemoans "people not being told" about the threat of a severe influenza pandemic and the requisite actions required to be prepared to meet that threat. Depending on how operative my very small supply of patience is that day is reflective of how bad the snit is.
People are exposed to "the message" nearly every day, and in 2006 it was many times a day in nearly every communication medium and venue in existence, at least in the US.
The message consists of the possibility that we will experience a pandemic in humans of H5N1 avian influenza, and that the pandemic may be severe. Severe is officially defined as a pandemic with approximately 30% of the population falling ill and 2% or more of those dying. In the U.S. those figures 30%/2% translate to 1.9 million deaths.
It is because the message carries ambiguity that people tend to not "hear" it, it's not because they aren't being told in the first place. The message must contain the high level of ambiguity that it does because we don't know if H5N1 will cause the next pandemic (it may be some other pathogen) and we don't know how severe the next pandemic will be if and when it arrives.
We, those that concern themselves with the issue of an influenza pandemic, can only deliver the message; we have no control over whether folk choose to "hear" that message. An example from today is found on the UK's Timesonline :
June 14, 2008 Michael Evans
The Armed Forces would struggle to cope if the country was hit by a pandemic flu, with more than 50 per cent of military personnel laid low, an internal Ministry of Defence document indicates.
The Royal Navy, Army and RAF would be so badly hit in the "worst-case scenario" because of their close working environment, particularly on warships, that no military personnel would be available to help the civil authorities, the study says.
"The priority ... will be maintaining critical military operations with little or no spare resource to provide military assistance to the civil authorities," says the internal MoD document, which is in the form of a guide for defence personnel.
In past crises, ranging from floods and foot-and-mouth disease to national strikes by firemen and petrol tanker drivers, the Armed Forces have played a key role in assisting the civil authorities.
However, with dire predictions of heavy flu casualties - up to 750,000 deaths and more than one million people needing hospital treatment - it is accepted officially that the Armed Forces would have to spend all their time ensuring that there were sufficient personnel to carry out basic military tasks and maintain operations abroad.
Experts have predicted the inevitabiity [sic] of another flu pandemic - there have been three global outbreaks in the past 100 years - and that it might come in several waves of three to six months over two years.
[All emphasis added]
There is absolutely no way that I accept the premise that people are not being told of the potential threat. I cannot, not with the evidence my own eyes see every single day, and have seen for several years now. Those that believe "the message" is being withheld from "the public" not only believe the withholding to be fact, but, sadly, and embarrassingly, they believe it is being withheld for a reason.
The reasons posited generally run "we don't want to panic the sheeple", or "let's not upset the economic status quo", or "it would cause financial markets to suffer". Since I argue that the message is not being withheld, I don't feel it necessary to refute the reasons given for such withholding.
Of course, people are free to believe what they believe. It's true for those who believe the message that a potential severe influenza pandemic is a genuine threat and it's true for those who choose to believe there is no threat. But make no mistake—it's a choice. Some have made that choice with conscious deliberation and some have not, instead they make something akin to an intuitive leap of belief—or disbelief—without any intellectual rigor or analysis. That is their right as free-thinking (or not) sentient beings.
But let's not assign fault or malfeasance to others for the choices made by those we, the flu obsessed, would want to believe as we believe: that a future severe influenza pandemic is possible, the threat doesn't necessarily exist in the remote future, and there are concrete things we ourselves can do to mitigate the severity on a community as well as personal level.
To state it plainly: should a severe pandemic happen it's all about your community and your personal situation. They are intimately and inextricably intertwined.
Choices—we all make them.
SZ
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