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The new swine flu: sounds scary. But what is the reality?
A few dozen people have died in Mexico, and there are some documented cases in other countries. What are we NOT seeing: rapid contagion; an exponentially growing number of fatalities; contagion affecting medical care professionals. SARS was frightening in its lethal spread. So far we are not seeing this with the new swine flu outbreak.
We need to keep on top of the fear mongering potential of this issue. There are real public health threats, which we can discuss as professionals/people interested in public policy; however they overlap with those who would take medium size threats and turn them into opportunities to make money and consolidate power.
Cui bono in each case. I followed the avian flu thing closely and was inside enough to see how that became a money making opportunity.
Whatever this new thing is, is real. It will kill some people. It deserves appropriate attention and resources.
But something like 36,000 people in the U.S. die from regular flu every year; I don’t hear a lot of screaming about that, except the one year Rumsfeld’s Tamiflu folks tried to manufacture a shortage of vaccine. And don’t get me started about other preventable deaths, here and abroad….
So yeah, I am afraid, just not of what you might think: I’m afraid of people who cry wolf so often that a REAL threat in the future would be ignored. I’m afraid of demagogues who advance their own narrow causes by making the rest of us scared, by magnifying a medium size problem into something terrifying. I’m afraid of resources at the CDC and state health boards - decimated during the Bush reign – now being forced into one issue at the expense of others that could save vastly more lives.
The author has an M.Sc. from Johns Hopkins School of Public Health
26 Comments
Taking a real problem, magnifying it, and turning it into an opportunity to consolidate power and make money…it sounds so familiar, doesn’t it?
Great post, egregious.
Shiny, shiny
Interesting that CIA torture apologist John Brennan conducted part of today’s White House briefing. We need to get Sebelius in there, and fast.
Thank you, egregious. I thought about you and your experience as this story surfaced. I hoped you will help us sort through this as it develops.
Didn’t Rummy have a piece of the tamiflu vaccine profiteering? Trying to remember that company name.
The company is G.D. Searle and Rumsfeld never divested himself of his holdings while he was SecDef. In fact, while they were ramping up the avian flu scare, Searle had the monumental balls tro tell the Bush administration that since it was so late coming to the table to order the meds there was a good chanxce they wouldn’t be able to get any in time.
In time for what?
Another scare that petered out.
This is the flu that the vaccine for killed more people than the actual disease in 1976, the year I decided flu shots weren’t for me.
Gilead Sciences is the inventor of Tamiflu. Licensed it to Roche and now joint marketers
Wiki with more info including Rumsfeld’s involvement:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oseltamivir
and there’s an excellant diary here too
http://oxdown.firedoglake.com/diary/4985
give that some play also, it’s really good
Ah, but history just keeps repeating itself. From an AP story today:
You can bet this means a fat new order of Tamiflu, even if the “moved” doses don’t get used this time around. Rummy probably just needed to cash in a few shares for spending money and wanted the share price up a bit…
and we don’t even know if Tamiflu works on this virus, either. False sense of security purchases with money we don’t have.
egregious — wanted to point out there is a potential upside to this scaremongering; it’s past time we had a conversation about national health care and the capacity of our current for-profit system to deal with a pandemic.
If people were able to seek treatment readily as early as possible for flu symptoms, without worrying about cost, our overall health as a nation would be more secure. But if people put off seeking medical attention until far too late, well…you know the rest of the drill, especially that period between way too late and contagion.
Totally agree – thanks Rayne. We need to get this conversation started.
i have been decrying that meme for YEARSSSSSSSSSSSS
…or perhaps legal fees
” When House Appropriations Committee chairman David Obey, the Wisconsin Democrat who has long championed investment in pandemic preparation, included roughly $900 million for that purpose in this year’s emergency stimulus bill, he was ridiculed by conservative operatives and congressional Republicans.
Obey and other advocates for the spending argued, correctly, that a pandemic hitting in the midst of an economic downturn could turn a recession into something far worse — with workers ordered to remain in their homes, workplaces shuttered to avoid the spread of disease, transportation systems grinding to a halt and demand for emergency services and public health interventions skyrocketing. Indeed, they suggested, pandemic preparation was essential to any responsible plan for renewing the U.S. economy.
The Republicans essentially succeeded. The Senate version of the stimulus plan included no money whatsoever for pandemic preparedness. In the conference committee that reconciled the House and Senate plans, Obey and his allies succeeded in securing $50 million for improving information systems at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). “
http://www.thenation.com/blogs…..l=hp_picks
What surprises me the most about the swine flu scare is that President Obama hasn’t yet been personally blamed for it. When I saw Drudge had linked to an article saying that Obama had shaken hands with a guy in Mexico who died from swine flu the next day, I was waiting to hear from the Drudge legions about Typhoid Barack & his Latin American infestation. We may yet.
The Constant Weader at http://www.RealityChex.com
Well, there was a question from the peanut gallery during the mid-day flu news presser yesterday about Obama being off golfing while the presser was taking place. And there’s a article from faux over at DU talking about how he was golfing yesterday. Not the hissy spit kind of reaction you’re talking about but more a low-level “he ain’t here doin’ his job” kinda thing.
More likely they’ll blame him for bringing it back to the US.
The UK Independent has a good Q and A here:
Swine flu: Who is at risk? What are the symptoms?
eg -
I really value your take on this subject; thanks so much for the diary!
As soon as this happened, I though of Rahm Emanuel’s dictum: Never let a crisis go to waste. My view is, this is the perfect platform to push for single payer health care. For an overall health care umbrella that folds everyone into it. Imagine how the health care system will break down if this virus, or any pandemic spreads like wildfire.
This is an opportunity to look at the big picture.
we caught this last night (1:25). Former WHO guy. It’s rational for TradMed and it’s what folks saw just before 60 Minutes last night.
CBS Evening News
and yes, eg, I too value your perspective on this. thanks
egregious,
are you familiar with Effect Measure ?
discovered them during Bird Flu panic. They are public health folks at Columbia. they contributed to breaking several big H5N1 stories including:
Rumsfeld’s Tamilflu connections
CDC was shutting out influenza researchers from their databases (google it with “Declan Butler”)
and, the then Govt pandemic point guy was a Thompson crony with zero public health knowledge.
look at the level headed explanatory reporting in this am’s link -
and thank you, egregious, for the informative diary and sensible perspective.
Thanks for remembering SARS, and some of its characteristics.
It was highly contagious = current flu, that is not yet determined.
Pattern or path of contagion from one person to another evident very early on = not yet evident with the current widely separated outbreaks.
It had a very short incubation period = this flu apparently does as well.
It was a lower lung infection (most flu is upper lung) and therefore SARS was much more serious and more lethal = I don’t know enough about current flu.
Most victims of infections with SARS were health care providers = not yet evident with current flu.
Could infect persons even though they were not in close physical contact with infected person (coughed up micro droplets of sputum carried SARS virus for considerable distances indoors) = don’t see that in current flu yet.
SARS virus could apparently survive for several days outside the body = that is a very unusual characteristic for any virus.
SARS was a brand new genetic evolution of a common cold virus = we know the strain of the current flu, type A, but is this a unique genetic form of type A?
Remember, as scary as SARS was it was contained, controlled and apparently exterminated in a relatively short time. WHO, CDC and other international organizations worked in concert to identify the causal agent and coordinate its control.
It was the first such coordinated international effort and was highly successful.
Marnie, thank you for this excellent summary of SARS versus the new virus.
In 2003, I tracked every new case, every fatality and every continuing case of SARS globally from my office in Toronto. The public health authorites were controlled by the neocons in power at the province and couldn’t do their job.
What I was looking for was a rate of transmission that looked like a Zipf power law curve.
It never happened.
That told me that instead of spreading exponentially, like chicken pox, it was spreading through direct contact, or multiplicatively.
This one seems not to be spreading like wild fire. A bit worrisome, but not terrifying.
As well, this is influenza. The key variable in flu is severity. We know a lot about it.
SARS was an unknown. No one had any idea how dangerous or containable it was.
As far as I can tell, the big unknown in this one is how it kills people in Mexico but not outside Mexico. That’s very strange and troubling.