We have gone demented here in Britain. Two Britons are or were (not very) ill from flu.
“This could really explode,” intones a reporter for BBC news.
“London warned: it’s here,” cries the Evening Standard.
Fear is said to be spreading “like a Mexican wave.” It “could affect” three-quarters of a million Britons. It “could cost” US$3 trillion.
The “danger,” according to the radio, is that workers who are not ill will be “worried” (perhaps by the reporter) and fail to turn up at power stations and hospitals.
Appropriately panicked, on Monday ministers plunged into their Cobra bunker beneath London to prepare for the worst. Had former prime minister Tony Blair been about they would have worn germ warfare suits. British government is barking mad.
What is swine flu? It is flu, a mutation of the H1N1 virus of the sort that often occurs. It is not a pandemic, despite the media prefix, not yet.
The BBC calls it a “potentially terrible virus,” but any viral infection is potentially terrible. Flu makes you feel ill. You should take medicine and rest. You will then get well again, unless you are very unlucky or have some complicating condition. It is best to avoid close contact with other people, as applies to a common cold.
In Mexico, 2,000 people have been diagnosed as suffering swine flu. Some 150 of them have died, though there is said to be no pathological indication of all these deaths being linked to the new flu strain. People die all the time after catching flu, especially if not medicated.
Nobody anywhere else in the world has died from this infection and only a handful have the new strain confirmed, most in the US and almost all after returning from Mexico. A British couple who caught the flu on holiday in Cancun are getting better. That tends to happen to people who get flu, however much it may disappoint editors.
We appear to have lost all ability to judge risk. The cause may lie in the national curriculum, the decline of “news” or the rise of blogs and concomitant, unmediated hysteria, but people seem helpless in navigating the gulf that separates public information from their daily round.
They cannot set a statistic in context. They cannot relate bad news from Mexico to the risk that inevitably surrounds their lives. The risk of catching swine flu must be millions to one.
Health scares are like terrorist ones. Someone somewhere has an interest in it. We depend on others with specialist knowledge to advise and warn us and assume they offer advice on a dispassionate basis, using their expertise to assess danger and communicating it in measured English. Words such as possibly, potentially, could or might should be avoided. They are unspecific qualifiers and open to exaggeration.
The WHO, always eager to push itself into the spotlight, loves to talk of the world being “ready” for a flu pandemic, apparently on the grounds that none has occurred for some time. There is no obvious justification for this scaremongering. I suppose the world is “ready” for another atomic explosion or another Sept. 11.
Professional expertise is now overwhelmed by professional log-rolling. Risk aversion has trounced risk judgment. An obligation on public officials not to scare people or lead them to needless expense is overridden by the yearning for a higher budget or more profit. Health scares enable media-hungry doctors, public health officials and drug companies to benefit by manipulating fright.
On Monday, EU Health Commissioner Androulla Vassiliou advised travelers not to go to North or Central America “unless it’s very urgent.” The British Foreign Office warned against “all but essential” travel to Mexico because of the danger of catching flu. This was outrageous. It would make more sense to proffer such a warning against the crime rate in the US. Yet such health-and-safety hysteria wiped millions from travel company shares.
During the mad cow disease scare of 1995-1997, grown men with medical degrees predicted doom, terrifying ministers into mad politician disease. The scientists’ hysteria, that mad cow disease “has the potential to infect up to 10 million Britons,” led to tens of thousands of cattle being fed into power stations and £5 billion (US$7.4 billion) spent on farmers’ compensation.
A year later, the scientists tried to maintain that mad cow disease “might” spread to sheep because, according to one government scientist, “the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” The meat industry was wrecked and an absurd ongoing cost was imposed on stock farmers with the closure and concentration of abattoirs.
This science-based insanity was repeated during the SARS outbreak of 2003, asserted by Dr Patrick Dixon, formerly of the London Business School, to have “a 25 percent chance of killing tens of millions.” The press duly headlined a plague “worse than AIDS.”
Not one Briton died.
The same lunacy occurred in 2006 with avian flu, erupting after a scientist named John Oxford declared that “it will be the first pandemic of the 21st century.” The WHO issued a statement that “one in four Britons could die.”
Epidemiologists love the word “could” because it can always assure them of a headline. During the avian flu mania, Canada geese were treated like Goering’s bombers. Workers with the UK’s Royal Society for the Protection of Birds were issued with protective headgear. The media went berserk, with interviewers asking why the government did not close all schools “to prevent up to 50,000 deaths.”
The BBC’s flagship current affairs radio program Today became frantic when a dead goose flopped down on an isolated Scottish beach and a hapless local official refused to confirm the BBC’s hysteria. The bird might pose no threat to Scotland, but how dare he deny London journalists a good panic?
Meanwhile a real pestilence, MRSA and C difficile, was taking hold in hospitals. It was suppressed by the medical profession because it appeared that they themselves might be to blame. These diseases have played a role in thousands of deaths in British hospitals — the former a reported 1,652 and the latter 8,324 in 2007 alone. Like deaths from alcoholism, we have come to regard hospital-induced infection as an accident of life, a hazard to which we have subconsciously adjusted.
MRSA and C difficile are not like swine flu: They are not an opportunity for public figures to scare and posture and spend money. They are diseases for which the government is to blame. They claim no headlines and no Cobra priority. Their sufferers must crawl away and die in silence.
Before 1945, the most widely spoken language in Taiwan was Tai-gi (also known as Taiwanese, Taiwanese Hokkien or Hoklo). However, due to almost a century of language repression policies, many Taiwanese believe that Tai-gi is at risk of disappearing. To understand this crisis, I interviewed academics and activists about Taiwan’s history of language repression, the major challenges of revitalizing Tai-gi and their policy recommendations. Although Taiwanese were pressured to speak Japanese when Taiwan became a Japanese colony in 1895, most managed to keep their heritage languages alive in their homes. However, starting in 1949, when the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) enacted martial law
Chinese agents often target Taiwanese officials who are motivated by financial gain rather than ideology, while people who are found guilty of spying face lenient punishments in Taiwan, a researcher said on Tuesday. While the law says that foreign agents can be sentenced to death, people who are convicted of spying for Beijing often serve less than nine months in prison because Taiwan does not formally recognize China as a foreign nation, Institute for National Defense and Security Research fellow Su Tzu-yun (蘇紫雲) said. Many officials and military personnel sell information to China believing it to be of little value, unaware that
“Si ambulat loquitur tetrissitatque sicut anas, anas est” is, in customary international law, the three-part test of anatine ambulation, articulation and tetrissitation. And it is essential to Taiwan’s existence. Apocryphally, it can be traced as far back as Suetonius (蘇埃托尼烏斯) in late first-century Rome. Alas, Suetonius was only talking about ducks (anas). But this self-evident principle was codified as a four-part test at the Montevideo Convention in 1934, to which the United States is a party. Article One: “The state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications: a) a permanent population; b) a defined territory; c) government;
The central bank and the US Department of the Treasury on Friday issued a joint statement that both sides agreed to avoid currency manipulation and the use of exchange rates to gain a competitive advantage, and would only intervene in foreign-exchange markets to combat excess volatility and disorderly movements. The central bank also agreed to disclose its foreign-exchange intervention amounts quarterly rather than every six months, starting from next month. It emphasized that the joint statement is unrelated to tariff negotiations between Taipei and Washington, and that the US never requested the appreciation of the New Taiwan dollar during the
RSS