Death and taxes can be postponed but not hysteria

Simon Mars

• Last Updated: July 28. 2009 11:06PM UAE / July 28. 2009 7:06PM GMT

Listening to a radio call-in-show from the UK on the internet last week, I could hear the hysteria over swine flu growing by the hour – as fearful callers stoked the national panic like children trying to outdo each other with scary stories at Halloween until a general refrain of “oh no, oh no, oh no, oh nooooooooo, we’re all going to die!” echoed over the land.

To be fair, they had a point. We are indeed all going to die. It’s the only true inevitability left. We lucky residents of the United Arab Emirates know that the other half of Benjamin Franklin’s ineluctable duality, taxes, are actually avoidable. So yes, we’re all going to die – but it’s unlikely we’re all going to die any time soon (unless we get hit by a meteorite but that’s another story.)

Now it so happens that I’ve got some first-hand experience of the pandemic – my sister and her son were among the first people to get the said, dreaded disease in their hometown in England. For over a week I heard how first my nephew and then my sister were feeling under the weather. Ah, I said, sagely, “You have swine flu”, to which my sister replied they couldn’t possibly have it since they weren’t actually feeling all that ill. And that’s exactly the point. For the overwhelming majority of people who are going to get it – it’s really not that serious.

Throughout history mankind has shown how it’s susceptible to mass hysteria. In the 16th century there was a phenomena known as The Dancing Plague (or choreomania) where groups of people, for reasons no one has ever been able to identify, would literally dance themselves to death. Some have suggested a further manifestation of this phenomenon occurred after people had been bitten by a tarantula – the name of the dance “tarantella” derives from this belief.

And mass hysteria is still taking place today. An incident occurred in Tanganyika in 1968, as documented by Robert Provine in a 1996 issue of American Scientist, where: “What began as an isolated fit of laughter (and sometimes crying) in a group of 12- to 18-year-old schoolgirls rapidly rose to epidemic proportions. Contagious laughter propagated from one individual to the next, eventually infecting adjacent communities. The epidemic was so severe that it required the closing of schools. It lasted for six months.”

If only our penchant for hysteria had been limited to laughter and dance. Sadly, history is littered with more dark examples such as the madness of the mass acceptance of fascist ideologies or the worldwide success of The Jonas Brothers.

The World Health Organisation has just said that swine flu is now unstoppable but the way most governments are reacting to it is not proportional to the seriousness of the problem. Last month I was in a country where a couple of people in white jackets were waiting at the airport peering suspiciously at the people coming off the planes as if they could detect signs of the disease just by staring at them. In China, the authorities are now placing foreign children on school trips in quarantine if they’re suspected of having the disease – although in England, where people have died from the illness, the government doesn’t seem unduly concerned, allowing people to fill in a questionnaire on the internet to figure out for yourself if you’re ill, and encouraging those that are to get a “flu friend” to pick up some Tamiflu at the local pharmacy.

And, yes, it is true that people are dying – at the time of writing there have been 263 deaths in the US since the swine flu arrived there over three months ago, but during that same time America would be on track to rack up some 7,533 deaths from gunshot wounds according to The New York Times. While it might not be that bad an idea to introduce a quarantine for gun owners, it’s not going to happen any time soon.

At the time of writing, the WHO puts the total amount of deaths worldwide at 429 – that’s compared to the 120,000 people it estimates die each year from cholera or the estimated 850,000 deaths from malaria or the 1.8 million people who die every year from a lack of access to clean water.

There’s a lot more out there to be worried about than swine flu. Yes, it’s true 50 million people died in the worldwide pandemic that followed the First World War and yes this version may, one day, mutate into something with fangs. But, for now, the best thing is to hope you actually get a dose of this not-so- deadly disease and perhaps build up some form of immunity before the arrival of it’s killer cousin.

Which is why I’m off to England next week to try and catch it while the most its likely to do is give me an excuse to lie in bed for a few days and listen to England beat Australia at the cricket.



Simon Mars is a TV producer based in Dubai and Cairo