A newspaper headline screams “DOCTORS MISS NEW SUPER VIRUS”, and I am not sure whether to laugh, snort, choke or scream myself. Even viruses have been caught up in the marketing and media hype and are now only mentioned with a preceding “super”, “deadly” or some other panic-invoking adjective.
When last did you hear of a plain old “virus”?
Remember the Pandemic (H1N1) 2009 a.k.a. Swine Flu—the one that had people cowering in fear in their homes? Tens of thousands of citizens all over the world stood in queues to get vaccinated against the new “super” that was going to decimate civilization—at least if the news and science media were to be believed. It certainly made it extremely difficult to travel and had much of the world population looking delightfully similar, if silly, for a while with the plethora of blue or white ‘fear-stickers’ covering half their face.
According to WHO statistics, approximately 18,000 people died worldwide from the H1N1 virus (and probably twice as many more from fear). In August 2011 WHO was still issuing post-pandemic bulletins with, of course, a “however” attached.
In 2011 there was the Global Food Poisoning Scare—the E.coli bacteria infection. According to an article on News24 website dated July 2011 “During the past week, newspapers and other media reports have been tracking the spread of a potentially fatal strain of an organism called Escherichia coli. The organism has caused a severe outbreak of food poisoning in Germany and has spread to twelve other European countries (News24, 2011B). New cases are being reported daily and by now the E.coli infection has migrated to America (Randall & Larkin, 2011).” Hundreds of thousands of tons of food were destroyed, farmers suffered huge losses from crops being either rejected at the market after huge delivery costs had been incurred, or in the fields. How many died from being infected? 53. That’s right 53. But the world spiralled into mass hysteria.
A news report on CCTV a few days ago: “China has reported its first death in 2012 from Bird Flu”—this with a scene of hundreds of chickens being slaughtered in the market. And how many died from bird flu worldwide in 2011? 29. But suddenly all birds are to be feared, Hong Kong bans all imports of chicken from China and lives of thousands of farmers are brought to a halt.
All viruses can potentially kill. The common seasonal flu virus kills more people a year (on average 300,000 according to WHO) than any ‘super’ one has in the last how many decades. If a virus is really ‘super’ it would wipe out half the population before pharmacists managed to rub the sleep out of their eyes.
Add ‘super’ or ‘scare’ or ‘pandemic’ to the words ‘virus’ or ‘bacteria’ and people queue at pharmacies, medical practitioners and clinics to buy preventative treatment.
In a world where population is growing at the rate of 85 million per year, these are the deaths that cause the hoopla:
| H1N1 Swine flu pandemic 2009 – 2011 | 18,000 |
| E.coli bacteria 2011 | 53 |
| Bird Flu or H5N1 virus 2011 | 29 |
Versus the “ho-hum-not-that-again” deaths that keep us carrying on, changing channels, eating popcorn, and self-destructing:
| Obesity related deaths | 300,000 (same as common flu virus!) |
| War | 1,000,000 |
| Starvation | 5,000,000 |
We are being sold—and buying into—fear, and fear buys media advertising time to sell drugs and drugs buy governments and governments buy people. The greatest controller of any nation is fear and fear is Big Business. There are no “free” vaccinations; we are paying, maybe not always in over-the-counter cash, but in increased health insurance premiums, and buying our own control.
The only things we should be allowing into our persona are massive doses of collective, intelligent information, and huge dollops of common sense. We have all the information available at our fingertips to prove or disprove wild and ‘super’ or ‘pandemic’ statements in order to make wise decisions, and take control our own lives.
