Well, it’s finally happened.
Last week, the A(H1N1) virus (which is still being referred to as “swine flu” by a number of media outlets, including the BBC) became a formal pandemic.
The World Health Organization made the announcement in an emergency meeting after cases of A(H1N1) rose sharply in Australia last week.
At present, A(H1N1) is present in 74 countries, and there are nearly 28,000 confirmed cases of infection. The overall impact of the disease, however, has been fairly manageable, causing mild to moderate illness in the vast majority of cases. Concerns over the disease have caused school shutdowns in many countries, including the United States, and it all but put Mexico City under total lockdown back in April when the disease first gained global media coverage.
As this article by the BBC suggests, there has been some dissonance between the general public concern over a possible A(H1N1) pandemic and the effects the pandemic has actually delivered.
Long story short: the pandemic warning system was really meant to alert the public to a genuinely dangerous outbreak along the lines of avian flu, that could cause widespread death and hospitalization. Thankfully, A(H1N1) has not done that, but as this blog reported earlier, it has caused a fair bit if collateral damage among the pork industry because of its unfortunate (and inaccurate) “swine flu” moniker.
Ultimately, the true weight of the pandemic should be kept in perspective.
Though the disease has killed and spread globally, its effects still pale in comparison to any number of more serious disease outbreaks throughout the world, such as cholera in Zimbabwe (the result of that country’s government utter failure to manage anything), dengue fever in Argentina (which is taking its toll politically on President Cirstina Kirchner) and the ever-present risk of malaria, which in 2006 alone sickened nearly 250 million people and killed some 881,000.
After A(H1N1) runs its course, the media (and this blog as well) will undoubtedly get rapped on the knuckles for overblown coverage of a modest disease. “Pandemic” is a measure of a disease’s breadth of exposure, not its severity of illness. And while the A(H1N1) story has proven to be not nearly as serious as early reports warned, better that we go on alert wrongly than pretend a risk does not exist.