Everybody was Swine Flu Fighting

This whole Swine Flu debacle seems more worthy of the comedic stylings of Jon Swift than Jon Stewart. It's the perfect storm of bureaucratic bumbling and media madness.

First off, we have the CDC and the WHO, both of whom appear incapable of communicating effectively with either the media or normal human beings. The renaming of the Swine Flu into the utterly unmemorable H1N1 Flu Virus was truly comic. Then there were the CDC reps I heard on the radio all weekend, attempting to calm everyone down by explaining that labelling a disease a pandemic simply means that it's widespread, not severe. At the same time, as my husband so reasonably pointed out, they've got a pandemic alert scale that they've raised to five and are threatening to raise to six out of six. In a world of colour-coded terror alerts, can you blame people for thinking that six out of six is supposed to be, like, really bad?

Then there's the usual media, "Oh my god IT CAME FROM MEXICO we're all going to DIE!!!" screeching. I can almost hear the disappointment in the Canadian TV news personalities' voices whenever someone fails to die of swine flu here. They're so sad about the lack of apocalypse so far that they've switched from "We're all going to DIE!!!" to the slyer "Is swine flu a threat... to your CHILDREN?" I swear, I feel worse for North America's criminally overprotected kids with every news report. I really hope they all rebel when they have children of their own, and actually let their kids go out and do fun stuff again.

Beyond the screaming headlines, however, you can get a fascinating glimpse into the labyrinthine world of US/Mexico relations. The typical US xenophobes are spouting their usual anti-immigrant rhetoric, and of course trying to use this as an excuse to rid the US of all "illegals", never mind that said "illegals" have been in the USA, not Mexico, and are no more likely to have swine flu than anybody else. More interesting (and insidious) is the casual equation of Mexico and other third world countries with uncleanliness and unsanitary living, never mind that the flu exists everywhere, and that North Americans really aren't all that great at washing their darn hands after using the public washroom. In the meantime, the Mexican public, fed up with US anti-Mexico rhetoric, is happy to entertain various conspiracy theories of Swine Flu actually starting in the US and being exported to Mexico.

Me? I continue to believe that driving on the streets of Toronto is far more likely to kill me than a global flu pandemic.

Edit: Update! The CBC News has helpfully informed us that the median age of all Greater Toronto Area swine flu sufferers is 25. Yes, that's the median age of all 36 cases of swine flu in the GTA. I'm so glad I have been provided with such important and statistically useful information!