The Dying Swan

I know, I should have written about the dead swan earlier. By now it's probably been buried with full military honours and the unfortunate Scots close to where it crashed to earth let out of quarantine. But my own medical problems (epilepsy and idleness) have hindered me. Better late than never then: Bird Flu Is In Britain (da da daaaah!)

Perhaps I should be frightened. The next time a duck even looks at me I should rush out and buy the masks and pills and respirators being sold by the usual snake oil merchants. Several things have stopped me, however. One is that like Prof Nof, who I sneered at last week, the medical panic reports have a heavy reliance on 'might' and 'if'. At the moment avian flu can be contracted by avians themselves and those in direct contact with their innards. Ah but if, we are told constantly. If the germ mutates it might be spread by any contact with birds, it might fly from human to human, it might make the Spanish Flu look like hayfever!!! 'If' is an elastic word, however. If the germ carries on mutating further it might grow a little hat and booties and look really cute under a microscope. If the Queen grows gonads, to adapt the old phrase, she'll become a King.

Another thing stopping my absolute terror is a refrain running through my head: 'Sars, Sars, Sars.' Because three years ago we were told we'd be lucky to even make it this far. And we were lucky to even get to the Sars scare, really, given that we should have been slain by the anthrax revival a few years before that. Bird flu ought to just be another horseman of the apocalypse, dimly registered as we dodge between the tidal waves and the terrorist dirty bombs. Sars, admittedly, was contained rather than fizzling out. The alertness which various governments showed was impressive; prevention is always better than cure. But the number of lives saved by press hysteria is the same as the number lost to Sars thus far in Britain. None.

Another mortality count: How many people, between the discovery of avian flu and its arrival in Britain, have died from maleria, HIV/AIDS, pneumonia and TB? How many more until the first life in Britain is taken by the flu, if any are? Those diseases don't get the hysterical headlines, though, and not simply because they've been killing for centuries. You can be almost certain of avoiding them by being relatively wealthy inside a relatively country. Not AIDS originally, and it caused an almighty panic when it first emerged. But since drugs were found to keep sufferers alive it's dropped off the headlines; and activists and aid organisations have to constantly remind us that it is actually eating up a whole continent. Many diseases are lifestyle ones in a way. People catch them by living in terrible conditions or doing terrible jobs, they die from them through a lack of food and medical treatment. They can be negated by wealth. Some new super-germ, though, which skips across class and national boundaries, which can get you whoever you are... that's always been one of the great terrors of the rich. It's us relatively rich who the journalists write for, after all. The ones with the income to respond to the adverts which keep the papers going. And fear, even more than sex, shifts copy.

I might be wrong about the bird flu menace. Maybe it will indeed sweep the world. One day one of the few survivors could read my scepticism and laugh sardonically. That at least will prove the society that we know really has been overthrown: someone reading this damn blog.