Rather alarming news:
The World Health Organisation has warned that “all of humanity is under threat” from a potential swine flu pandemic and called for “global solidarity” to combat the virus.
The plea came as the WHO raised the swine flu threat awareness level to 5 out of 6, indicating that the world is on the brink of a pandemic.
Holland and Switzerland both confirmed their first cases of swine flu on Thursday, bringing the total number of countries affected around the world to 11.
Some people are wondering why we’re not closing the borders and, since were not, whether this is just a bit of panic-mongering by governments which feed on crisis? I don’t think so – in fact, I think its likely worse than is being reported. Metropolitan Mexico City is more than 20 million people, many of whom live in squalid slums where services are nearly non-existent…such people are not going to the hospital and getting counted in the official figures; and how many people are willing to go into the slums to survey the rate of infection? A recent poll of Mexico City residents found that 57% figured the government is under-reporting the number of swine flu cases – I tend to agree, though not, perhaps, for the reasons Mexicans are doubtful. They are doubtful because their hopelessly corrupt and inefficient government is nearly always lying to them – I am doubtful because I don’t think the Mexican government has the resources to really get a grip on the crisis.
As to the subject of closing the borders – the disease is already in the United States so we’re pretty much going to suffer what we’ll suffer…having one more Mexican with the flu come in won’t materially affect the outcome. Unless we want to forbid all travel within the United States, closing the borders would be worthless…and even if we wanted to forbid travel, we can’t; our cities need to be fed. No point in saving a million people from the swine flu only to have ten million die of diseases brought about by shortages in the cities. But I’m also not too concerned about us.
Why is that? Because, goes my thinking (confirmed with a bit of knowledge gleaned from the reports) the people who are dying aren’t dying of the flu but of secondary complications – a person weakened by the flu gets pneumonia and that is what kills him. Now, why is it so prevalent in Mexico? Because they have a population already pre-weakened by substandard nutrition, high levels of industrial pollution and lack of basic medical care – the disease gets in to such a population and runs wild. My worry is that this same sequence of events will repeat itself in Cairo, Karachi, Mumbai and a score of other large, Third World cities which are situated similar to Mexico City – very large metro populations including very large slums. This flu breaks into those areas of the world and we could really have tens of millions at risk of death, combined with a massive social disruption as people try to flee the disease.
We should keep in mind that such a thing as a flu pandemic doesn’t necessarily just burn through once and its over – the flu of 1918 came, went and then came back again. We’re not out of the woods by a long shot – though there is still that chance that the strain will fizzle and we’ll be spared the worst of what could happen.
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