The Swine Flu and Other Excuses to Be Too Safe

Dateline - May 1, 2009 (I wish this were April 1, so I could say "April Fools Day" to the following fictitious scenario):

"According to news media reports, the world renowned CSI teams (of CBS fame) have uncovered the real origins of the Swine Flu. Working backwards, they have reconstructed its path and have leapt to the following conclusion, even without full evidence at hand.

The first cases of flu occurred around the time President Obama visited Mexico (not really, but I'll ignore other evidence for the sake of supporting my hypothesis). In fact, there was even concern that one Mexican citizen succumbed to the flu after meeting briefly with the President. This suggested that perhaps the President might have been a swine flu carrier. If that's the case, where did the President become infected by the flu? Clearly, if swine were involved, it must be at the biggest pork facility in the world -- Capitol Hill. Could the disease have emanated from all that pork barrel spending? And since elected officials in Congress (of both parties) have been engaged in such porky activities for decades, most, if not all, must be immune to its effects. They are now only carriers of the disease. President Obama, having come from their ranks, must likewise, just be a "Typhoid Mary."

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is prepared to tell the Mexican government and the World Health Organization (WHO) that the United States takes full responsibility for the outbreak of Swine Flu and humbly apologizes for its actions."

Well, the trail described above may not be correct, but now the U.S., Mexico and the world, all under the direction of the WHO and news media are driving the events of a "Swine Flu" pandemic. Based on what I can see from most news sources, it is fast becoming a self-fulfilling "Swine Flu" pandemonium. The more the media showcases people who refuse to travel; images of the masses who walk around wearing face masks; and reports that dozens of U.S. schools (affecting more than 225,000 kids) close based on one or several suspected cases of the flu (Fort Worth, Minnesota, Chicago, Southwest Florida), the more others follow suit. And with "swine" being the watchword, Egyptian officials have ordered the eradication of all the Nation's pigs. It's noteworthy that Egypt (even without a single swine flu case) is the only country in the world to order a mass pig slaughter in response to the disease. Egypt undertook similar actions during its battle with bird flu in 2006 (killing some 25 million birds).

Associated Press Business Writer, Tarek El-Tablawy quoted Abdullah Kamal of the daily Rose El-Youssef (a pro-government Egyptian newspaper) that, "Killing (pigs) is not a solution, otherwise, we should kill the people, because the virus spreads through them."

To keep things fully in focus, U.S. swine producers are now concerned that humans will transmit the disease to their pigs! Meanwhile, the WHO is officially referring to the new influenza virus as influenza A(H1N1), in an attempt to remove the focus on swine.

Now, please don't get me wrong. I understand that this strain of the flu can be quite virulent and that it MAY evolve into something worse than it is right now. But the world has been infected with the flu before and never has it garnered so much immediate attention. In fact, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) usually post a map showing where the flu outbreaks are most severe. And annually, the flu, just the latest varieties, kills tens of thousands in the U.S. alone although actual statistics may be suspect.(http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2005-12-11-flu-deaths_x.htm). Latest statistics for the current outbreak (as of May 2, 2009) show slightly more than 150 confirmed cases in the U.S. and a total of about 600 globally.

But for this outbreak, just having it start has created almost instantaneous panic. With only a relative few global fatalities (all but one actually in Mexico), the world has responded as though this was a modern day bubonic plague or "the sky is falling." Maps on TV and the Internet give us minute-by-minute updates as to where the latest cases have been discovered. And, even the U.S. President has seen fit to take to the air advising American to wash their hands and cover their coughs, while the Vice President suggests strongly that traveling in confined places is not a good idea. Of course, those comments have now been restated to 'what the Vice President meant to say was..."

This type of message is really the job for the President's Health Secretary, not the President himself. There are other, much more pressing problems for presidential attention.

Of course, all of this hoopla could be predicated on the idea that government (U.S. and the WHO) and the media needs yet another excuse to show that they are in charge.

The result is that medical mask manufacturers and drug companies are the beneficiaries, while airlines, hotels and other companies that thrive on bringing people together may be the losers. In fact, Continental Airlines is cutting back its flight schedule to Mexico as people curtail travel plans.

There are also reports that people have to pay at price gouging levels for Tamiflu, while National Guard members are guarding Tamiflu supplies in some states.

BACK TO THE FUTURE

Once upon a time, some 50 plus years ago, I was a kid. We played in the dirt (sometimes eating it), maybe washed our hands a few times a day (or even less frequently), and did other "unsanitary" things. We even rode bicycles without helmets, played contact sports on the front lawns and at school and even ate "bad foods." Yes, we caught colds, may have been chubby and our parents smoked a lot. Still, most of us survived.

It made sense to change some of these behaviors. And many of us have done so. Smoking is now taboo in many places and people are dying less from lung cancer; we know the risks of getting too much sun and we are taking steps to lessen risk from skin cancer; and many of the foods we eat are healthier (although they are now filled with potentially harmful chemicals and preservatives).

I am for making us more knowledgeable and better able to make "proper" choices. I personally like nutritional labeling and some of the warning labels that grace our shelves these days. And I am 110% behind smoking limitations. Regardless of health concerns, cigarette smoke just reeks!

On the other hand, we have become a society fixated on being ultra-clean. If the expression, "cleanliness is next to godliness," is to be believed, we are there.

Products for keeping our counter tops, our toys, and our shopping carts germ-free abound. It's as though you can't touch anything for fear of finding a germ. Yet, those minor encounters with germs have, in the past, allowed us to build up immunities that protected us, in part, from encounters with bigger and even worse germs. The efforts to keep us 100% germ-free (or close to that level) may have actually started to make us 100% vulnerable to getting sicker.

On Being 100% Safe

Now, I am not in favor of spreading germs. In fact, I take reasonable efforts to minimize their spread. For example, when a student at my math center uses a tissue, I ask that they flush it rather than stuff it into a trash can. And my tutors and I periodically wipe down the tables at our center. But we don't swab tabletops after each kid visits. Simply stated, I'm not Mr. Monk.

To put the absurdity of all this cleanliness into perspective, consider what happened at my wife's school yesterday. One student said he wanted to wash his hands because he had just sneezed into them. My wife allowed him to head to the class bathroom. My wife had someone open the bathroom door for the student, but the student then touched the faucet handles with his tainted hands.

To correct this situation, my wife would have had to ask another student to open the door and turn on the water, without any knowledge of who had touched these before.

Thus, in protecting the class from this one boy, she might have actually exposed another child to germs from another student.

The alternative would be have each child don latex gloves as they open doors and turn on faucets, wipe down the door and faucet knobs with disinfectant, trash the gloves into a sealed disposal container and then wash his/her hands. Upon returning to his/her desk, the student would then need to wipe down the desk and chair, any pencils or pens and even the covers of textbooks, just to be sure.

Or maybe after each child sneezes, she needs to have a special disinfectant sprayed throughout the room via an installed disinfectant system that was not harmful to her students.

What I'm saying is that there are reasonable steps one can take to stop "germs" from spreading. In fact, the 80-20 rule probably works pretty well here. But in striving for 100% safety or effectiveness (as we seem determined to do in everything we do), we can often produce unintended consequences. Just look to the automobile industry as a model example. To clean the air at higher and higher levels, we forced car manufacturers to build cars of a certain genre. But some cars and trucks were then made to be smaller or contain less body metal construction, thus compromising safety.

Now, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is suggesting the carbon dioxide is a health risk and it needs to be curtailed. Let's get real. We exhale carbon dioxide. Should we stop breathing to stop so-called global warming? Or maybe we need to wear carbon dioxide collection packs? What about the methane we exude from certain other parts of our bodies?

Where do we draw the line? If crowds are not safe places to be when the flu is around, do we close down all sporting events during the winter flu season? Do we curtail the number of passengers on urban mass transit during rush hour? Do we stop airline travel for 4 to 5 months each late fall to early spring period? Should schools and colleges close all flu season and be open all summer? Or maybe Congress should not meet since all those elected officials, their staffs and the lobbyists might infect each other?

If we did this each time a flu outbreak surfaced, we may as well stay isolated in our homes, have disinfected foods delivered to us and passed to us through sealed airlocks and never interact with anyone for fear of catching a cold or the flu. Hotels and airlines would go out of business. Schooling would be done completely via the Internet in the so-called safety of our own homes. I say "so-called" because the EPA has advised us that the air in our homes is typically more unsafe than the air outside our homes.

I think it's time for sanity to return. Yes, we should take reasonable steps to curtail the spread of disease, especially those that are hard to eradicate - tuberculosis, polio, AIDS and measles to name a few. And we should monitor and take actions to lessen the spread of certain diseases, not spread panic. Let's give our bodies a chance to develop some antibodies and immunities to flu strains that forever keep evolving. If we don't evolve too, we may find ourselves so safe that even the most minor disease can overcome us.