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.