UK pseudo-media types prep people to imprudent behavior:
The novelist and Evening Standard columnist Will Self has been similarly scathing, describing the predictions of imminent Apocalypse – or “Aporkalypse”, as some wags put it – as so much media “squealing”. Meanwhile, Michael O’Leary, the embattled boss of Ryanair, in a desperate effort to stave off a further catastrophic fall in passenger numbers in a business only just beginning to recover from the credit crunch, claims that only people “living in slums” in Mexico and Asia are at risk.
And then we have Marc Segal,MD at FOX:
In the current swine flu scare the virus is assumed to be a more powerful human killer than it actually is. In reality it appears to [be]losing virulence as it spreads human to human and is not that transmissable, and is NOT becoming widespread.
The vast overreaction to this virus and its potential has severe economic consequences as it did previously in 1976, 2003, and 2006. This time the hysteria may lead to billions of dollars lost to the travel industry, tourism, the Mexican economy, and to closing schools due to hysterical children and overreacting nurses. Vice President Biden’s statement that we should all avoid planes, trains, and crowded places was not at all consistent with the very low prevalence of the virus. It made me think he had become disoriented and suddenly thought he was back in 1918! Even President Obama’s statement that we should wash our hands (of course we should, they are loaded with bacteria and viruses of all kinds) sent the wrong message that there is far more of this particular virus around than there actually is. (The chance that this virus is on your hands as you read this is extremely close to zero).
As one commenter put it, Dr. Segal probably has a stock Tamaflu under his bed, so he'll be fine.
The rest of us are on our own.
And I AM feeling better today. I hope to get out to my garden tomorrow morning. Weather should be just dandy for planting the beans and herbs.
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