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Traffic Light Disease

Green Alert. Orange Alert. Red Alert. It's traffic light disease.

The Mexican swine flu appears to be spreading. I've now seen it on the front page of every newspaper, as the lead story on the TV news and occupying large swathes of the World News section.

The TV summary provided me with what radio cannot. They showed a picture of a pig, and said "swine flu is something you get from pigs." So that's it. I had always wondered. Adolf had the more reasonable assumption that it came directly from (Labour Party) politicians, but perhaps that is "foot in mouth" disease?

Then they showed how the swine flu moves from pig to man. Queue picture of man standing next to pig. Queue green blob on pig. Queue green blob appearing on man. Obviously, the first symptom is some large green mucous blob leaps from a pig to a nearby pig farmer, and from there, the world.

I think I'll get updates from the radio.

A side effect of any potential epidemic is that it gets promoted to pandemic very quickly, and breaks out across the front page with little resistance. It almost makes me want to not take this seriously. Almost? Fellow blogger Andrei points out the "Cry Wolf" syndrome that is part and parcel of another malady - media congestion.

If I could do a good Mexican accent over the blog, I could ask if New Zealand is heading for a ham bush. Not that wiping out 6% to 20% of the population would be funny, although the Greens might call it a start. Ah - now I see that "Green Alert" is actually more serious than "Red Alert".

MacDoctor spells out the possible theories and outcomes ranging from the totally ridiculous (the health authorities have this under control) to the more reasonable suggestion that they have completely under estimated the potential danger. File that under "they really are that stupid" if the proverbial pig manure hits the air conditioning unit.

Still, if I were the health department I'd have a press release ready: "No comment on current epidemic until entire department returns from sick leave." That would cover them, and you have to admit, the excuse sounds plausible.

I don't know about you, but I'm going to have an extra vitamin C tablet and suggest people stay home and spend more time reading the blogs. Where they can't infect me or my loved ones.


Related Millions of Links: Swine Flu 2009

Comments

  1. I think I'm going to totally ignore the whole thing, until and unless it becomes a true pandemic.
    It'll be amusing to sit back and watch 'The Authorities' make a complete pig's ear of their half-baked disaster management plans...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Maybe the stocks of tamiflu are reaching the end of their shelf life and need to be turned over?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Or the shareholders want dividends so they can have a holiday somewhere.

    Prices are cheap in Mexico at the moment.

    ReplyDelete

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