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.
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