Now, America and Canada are reporting cases of the virus and am starting to think the timing of all this is a bit queer. Leave it to American news media to hammer home any frightful incident into a pandemic inevitability. The news media perpetuate fear like a domineering lover perpetuates dependence, instilling paranoia via comforting words like "concern," "security," "safeguard," and, quixotically, with expert assurances that we've no need to panic or worry so long as we thoroughly wash our hands. Oh brother!
The common cold does not fall otherwise healthy people in alarming numbers. Swine flu, like SARS and the Black Plague before it, is not a common cold. Still, that such a virus is multiplying---or reportedly multiplying---throughout NAFTA countries out of the clear blue is fantastically thought-provoking.
Leave it to American news media to hammer home any frightful incident into a pandemic inevitability
Nature, unassisted, does not evolve this rapidly. Glaziers move and melt at a slow pace, meteorites like the scale that wiped out dinosaurs are far from routine, tsunamis and earthquakes are not staple features of weather reports. Crippling organisms such as bacteria and viruses require time to adapt and surpass other organisms' immune defenses; a point of fact which swine flu appears to contradict and so, now, trusty CNN has converted their ever featured gloom&doom colored map of the country to highlight swine flu cases instead of home foreclosures.
Earlier today the World Health Organization announced America has forty confirmed cases. From zero to seven to, now, forty confirmed cases. Just like that. In, what, three days?
Read the incoming reports with a clear eye and incredulity and see if a few elements appear amiss.
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