On the Road During the Swine Flu Breakout

Because my plane was delayed for two and a half hours at JFK on Sunday in a hot, unair conditioned terminal despite the heat wave, I got to hear, involuntarily, the hysteria about Swine Flu fever, blasted from the flat screen televisions tuned to CNN. I am a bit germ-phobic to begin with, having gotten a sinus infection not once but twice this winter, each time after flying. Obviously when you sit near anyone with a cough or cold, you get it too, because the air isn't being circulated and filtered properly in the airplanes. Another marker of deregulation.

Now a mere sniffle, after hours of the bombardment of Swine Flu hysteria, will initially elicit fears of it being lethal, even for a healthy minded person.

Last night I had dinner with my friends in Minneapolis. We got back to the hotel late, and I had already missed The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. So I had to put on "real" news. It was Chris Mathews "Hard Ball." He had on Pat Buchanan, that xenophobic idiot, who blamed Swine Flu on illegal immigrants. He was shouting about how illegal immigrants come here with all kinds of diseases: TB, HIV, and now Swine Flu.

That's such a helpful analysis, don't you think?

Listen, Pat, we live in a global world. People move across borders, most of whom are legal, like those high school kids in Queens who took a class trip to Mexico and came back ill. Where do the illegal immigrants fit into the reality of what has happened?

The pandemic of 1918, the Spanish flu, that killed millions of people worldwide, spread not because of illegal immigration, but because of World War I. The close quartering of new military recruits brought together the human soup needed to incubate the virus, mutate it from a benign to a virulent bug, and then the movement of troops across American and the Atlantic to the war spread the disease. 28% of all Americans were infected. 675,000 Americans died. Worldwide the pandemic 2.5% mortality rate was high, killing perhaps 50 million people. What was so cruel about the Spanish flu was that it particularly hit young adults in the prime of their lives--20-40 years old. Since its outbreak was during World War I, its spread domestically was accelerated by the repressive Sedition Laws that prevented newspapers from reporting on the disease for fear that it would be considered information demoralizing to the war effort.

That isn't the problem this time around: the hysteria seems to be quite premature. Yes, pandemic flu does appear in less virulent forms first, then if it is going to turn nasty, it becomes more lethal as it mutates into a super germ. But no one knows if that is the fate of this virus. It does appear to spread easily among humans, not a good sign. Whether it mutates into something more dangerous, well, no one knows for sure. I suspect that those who believe in "intelligent design" might think it's in God's hands. I suspect that it is just chance.

Calm down, calm down. Breathe, exhale.