According to recent news reports, out of approximately 30,000 people infected by the swine flu worldwide 145 have died. Of course, these are just official numbers. Most likely, more people have been infected by the swine flu than has been officially tabulated, and, just as likely, more people have died from the swine flu than what official figures indicate.
Going by the official numbers, one's odds of dying -- if one contracts the swine flu -- are approximately 1 in 200.
This is not extremely high, but it's also not especially low. Certainly, the risk would seem to warrant more media attention being paid to the swine flu than is currently is being offered – at least within the United States (I’ve noticed the German media appear to be devoting more attention to the swine flu).
More importantly, the risk warrants a much more thorough effort on the part of the American media -- and American society in general -- to fully investigate and establish the cause of the swine flu.
Of course, as I've noted in another recent newsvine column, 'Denial on the swine flu' (http://demont-heinrich.newsvine.com/_news/2009/06/11/2919565-denial-on-the-swine-flu), there are many reasons so little effort seems to be being devoted to figuring out how and why the swine flu broke out where it did when it did.
Chief among these reasons: Mainstream media’s and mainstream society's near complete -- and potentially quite self-destructive -- denial on the mass production of meat. None of us wants to know where our hot dog came from -- apparently even if not paying more attention to this might end up killing a lot of us.
Need concrete evidence of mainstream media’s and mainstream society’s denial on factory farming? A LexisNexis Academic search on 6/12/09 of “Major U.S. and World Publications” using the keywords “swine flu” and “factory farming” yields just 24 articles, the vast majority of them opinion columns published in media outlets outside of the United States (in the UK, Australia and New Zealand).
Reputable research has warned of the dangers of large-scale meat production to the environment and to the health of human beings – not to mention to the animals themselves. For instance, in 2008, The Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production issued a report in which the authors note that filthy and congested industrial hog farms are prime breeding grounds for potentially extremely lethal pathogens (http://www.ncifap.org/).
If you're wondering how a 1 in 200 chance you will die from the swine flu -- if you contract it -- compares to other potential means of dying, here are some odds for Americans I tracked down at http://live.science.com (specific page URL = http://www.livescience.com/environment/050106_odds_of_dying.html).
Heart Disease = 1-in-5
Cancer = 1-in-7
Stroke = 1-in-23
Accidental Injury = 1-in-36
Motor Vehicle Accident = 1-in-100
Intentional Self-harm (suicide) = 1-in-121
Falling Down = 1-in-246
Assault by Firearm = 1-in-325
Air Travel Accident = 1-in-20,000
Lightning Strike = 1-in-83,930
Right now, the 1 in 200 odds you will die of the swine flu – if you contract it – place this risk somewhere between the risk of dying in a motor vehicle accident and the risk of dying from a fall. Of course, dying by a fall is not defined by live.science.com. For instance, does falling off a moving bike count?
Given that the swine flu is an unfolding global pandemic, it is pretty much impossible to calculate what the odds are that one will actually contract it. That said, the current odds that you or I will contract H1N1 right now, in June 2009 -- which is not flu season in North America – are almost certainly low.
However, as the virus spreads, these odds clearly increase, perhaps exponentially. They’ll surely increase – perhaps quite substantially -- when the Northern Hemisphere hits its flu season in the winter of 2009-10. It’s therefore extremely misleading for some to suggest that the swine flu doesn’t matter, because the odds of catching it – right now, at this very moment -- are low.
Just as problematic are paternalistic admonitions not to "panic". It’s as if the people who make these suggestions think the rest of us are idiot chicken littles because we -- in comparison to them -- apparently know so little about the actual danger and threat posed by a complex pathogen capable of quickly mutating and of quickly expanding its pool of victims.
But exactly what are the odds of the swine flu taking off – really taking off? In fact, no one knows – not even the paternalistic pundits who claim to “know” better than the rest of us!
Calculating odds of death so generally, as they are in the livescience.com chart I use here, is, of course, misleading. General odds-making fails to take into account the many variables that could increase – or decrease – the odds a particular individual will die in a motor vehicle accident or from being hit by lightning.
Clearly, the more often you drive, the more miles you cover, the type of car you drive, whether you text while driving etc. – along with countless other variables – all play a role in one’s own particular chance of dying in a car accident. Similarly, a person who lives in Colorado, which has a huge number of lightning strikes per year, as opposed to far Northern Alaska, which does not, is obviously much more likely to die of a lightning strike than their Northern Alaskan counterpart.
My goal in considering the question of the odds of dying if one contracts the swine flu isn’t to create or spread panic. Instead, it’s an attempt to push us – as a society -- to treat the H1N1 pandemic with the seriousness it deserves, and, most importantly, to seriously investigate its cause. Right now, our approach to establishing the cause of the swine flu is denial – I don’t really want to know because it might affect the way I think about meat. This doesn’t seem like an especially healthy – or smart – approach.
Friday, June 12, 2009
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Denial on the swine flu
Until the WHO announcement of a global pandemic yesterday, news of the swine flu was drifting off the media radar screen. This, even as the virus continued to -- and continues to -- establish itself around the world, ready to potentially unleash a much more deadly outcome than it has thus far when the next flu season hits the Northern hemisphere.
Despite the deadly seriousness of the swine flu, media coverage has paid scant attention to the most important questions swirling around the swine flu – How and why did the outbreak occur when and where it did?, and, What can and should be done to prevent another such outbreak?
It's worth noting that at the same time we have essentially no coverage of the how and why behind the swine flu -- which could potentially crash the whole of humanity -- we have an absolute media obsession with the how and why on the Air France crash.
There are a number of reasons why the how and why questions behind the swine flu pandemic have failed to garner much coverage. First, the how and why questions are typically the most difficult for journalists to pursue and answer within the constraints of "objectivity". Second, increasingly severe economic constraints on journalism limit journalists’ ability to fully address the often extremely complex and difficult to probe how and why questions.
However, the problem extends far beyond news media norms and economics. The lack of focus on how and why -- and a restricted focus in terms of the crucial “what next?” question -- reflect larger tendencies in American society. One might term these the four D’s, or Defense, Denial, Dollars, and Dehumanization.
In fact, a pretty clear – and very narrow -- answer to ‘What next?’ has been delivered. Create a vaccination and inoculate.
No one would deny the importance of creating a medical defense against H1N1. The trouble is, offense – or prevention – falls from view. Instead of investing ourselves in figuring out how the outbreak occurred, why it occurred, and what we can do to prevent another such outbreak, we gloss over these issues and employ a back-end solution, or a solution grounded in defense rather than offense.
We opt for a defensive approach in part because we do not want to consider the possibility that our food production system might be responsible for breeding deadly pathogens. In other words, we deny the possibility that we are potentially creating the conditions of our own demise.
Denial – a powerful human trait -- is deeply ingrained when it comes to meat consumption. We don’t want to know where our hot dog came from, and woe betide the person who dares discuss this. Our denial is understandable. But it could also be dangerous if, for instance, we allow it to prevent us from taking a close, sustained, and informed look at the possible link between H1N1 and the mass production of meat.
That we are reluctant to “go there” is not just a matter of denial but also of dollars. Mass production methods typically push consumer costs down and producer profits up. Yet the apparent benefits of modern, mass-produced meat could potentially end up costing us in the long run, both in economic and human terms. In other words, short-term advantages might be outweighed by long-term disadvantages.
The balance between short-term and long-term costs is also worth examining in terms of the approach we have taken with respect to the spread of H1N1. Economic savings has been one of the basic rationales for the current approach, which appears to be let H1N1 spread and then address it in those places to which it has spread. If the pandemic intensifies, it could turn out that trying to save money in the short-term -- and seemingly crossing our fingers that the virus won’t mutate into a deadlier form -- might end up costing us far more in the long-term.
H1N1 carries current and potential economic and human costs. Sadly, we tend to dehumanize those who have died from the swine flu by treating them as statistics rather than as fellow human beings. It is as if in denying swine flu victims their individual humanity we believe we will miraculously reduce our own chances of becoming a victim ourselves.
There is a certain selfish rationality in appealing to numbers rather than to our collective humanity when confronted by the death of a fellow human being. It reduces our own fear that we might have the bad luck of becoming a “statistic”. But it seems to me that we somehow can, or at least ought to, try to keep our wits about us while also acknowledging that, as human beings, each us could fall victim to H1N1. Indeed, because so much is clearly at stake for all of us, we ought to vigorously investigate and pursue the conditions that led to the emergence of H1N1. This, so that we might be better prepared to prevent the next global pandemic from taking flight, hopefully before it has ever had a chance to take off.
Despite the deadly seriousness of the swine flu, media coverage has paid scant attention to the most important questions swirling around the swine flu – How and why did the outbreak occur when and where it did?, and, What can and should be done to prevent another such outbreak?
It's worth noting that at the same time we have essentially no coverage of the how and why behind the swine flu -- which could potentially crash the whole of humanity -- we have an absolute media obsession with the how and why on the Air France crash.
There are a number of reasons why the how and why questions behind the swine flu pandemic have failed to garner much coverage. First, the how and why questions are typically the most difficult for journalists to pursue and answer within the constraints of "objectivity". Second, increasingly severe economic constraints on journalism limit journalists’ ability to fully address the often extremely complex and difficult to probe how and why questions.
However, the problem extends far beyond news media norms and economics. The lack of focus on how and why -- and a restricted focus in terms of the crucial “what next?” question -- reflect larger tendencies in American society. One might term these the four D’s, or Defense, Denial, Dollars, and Dehumanization.
In fact, a pretty clear – and very narrow -- answer to ‘What next?’ has been delivered. Create a vaccination and inoculate.
No one would deny the importance of creating a medical defense against H1N1. The trouble is, offense – or prevention – falls from view. Instead of investing ourselves in figuring out how the outbreak occurred, why it occurred, and what we can do to prevent another such outbreak, we gloss over these issues and employ a back-end solution, or a solution grounded in defense rather than offense.
We opt for a defensive approach in part because we do not want to consider the possibility that our food production system might be responsible for breeding deadly pathogens. In other words, we deny the possibility that we are potentially creating the conditions of our own demise.
Denial – a powerful human trait -- is deeply ingrained when it comes to meat consumption. We don’t want to know where our hot dog came from, and woe betide the person who dares discuss this. Our denial is understandable. But it could also be dangerous if, for instance, we allow it to prevent us from taking a close, sustained, and informed look at the possible link between H1N1 and the mass production of meat.
That we are reluctant to “go there” is not just a matter of denial but also of dollars. Mass production methods typically push consumer costs down and producer profits up. Yet the apparent benefits of modern, mass-produced meat could potentially end up costing us in the long run, both in economic and human terms. In other words, short-term advantages might be outweighed by long-term disadvantages.
The balance between short-term and long-term costs is also worth examining in terms of the approach we have taken with respect to the spread of H1N1. Economic savings has been one of the basic rationales for the current approach, which appears to be let H1N1 spread and then address it in those places to which it has spread. If the pandemic intensifies, it could turn out that trying to save money in the short-term -- and seemingly crossing our fingers that the virus won’t mutate into a deadlier form -- might end up costing us far more in the long-term.
H1N1 carries current and potential economic and human costs. Sadly, we tend to dehumanize those who have died from the swine flu by treating them as statistics rather than as fellow human beings. It is as if in denying swine flu victims their individual humanity we believe we will miraculously reduce our own chances of becoming a victim ourselves.
There is a certain selfish rationality in appealing to numbers rather than to our collective humanity when confronted by the death of a fellow human being. It reduces our own fear that we might have the bad luck of becoming a “statistic”. But it seems to me that we somehow can, or at least ought to, try to keep our wits about us while also acknowledging that, as human beings, each us could fall victim to H1N1. Indeed, because so much is clearly at stake for all of us, we ought to vigorously investigate and pursue the conditions that led to the emergence of H1N1. This, so that we might be better prepared to prevent the next global pandemic from taking flight, hopefully before it has ever had a chance to take off.
