This morning as I awoke to come to work, reports were surfacing that the first US swine flu death had been reported. The loss of any human life is saddening. I feel sympathy for anyone who loses a loved one, especially, as in this case, just an infant.
More details are now starting to surface and another instance of media irresponsibility is illustrated. As it turns out, the 23 month old girl is not from the US, she is from Mexico. She contracted the disease in Mexico, and was in the US recieving treatment. There are only 65 confirmed cases of swine flu in the US and outside of this one individual, they are all reported as mild. It is ridiculousness to use the death of a little girl to insight greater viewership. It cheapens the story and the death of the little girl to report partial, false or misleading information.
Now the US government is starting to talk about taking "utmost" precautions. We must be wary of over reaction. This is not the first encounter our country has had with swine flu. In 1976 a version of swine flu hit the US originating in New Jersey on a military base. One private died and Pres. Ford, under extreme pressure, decided to start a compaign to vacinate the US population against this terrible virus. Staring in October, 40 million people were vacinated. The only problem was that the vaccine caused paralysis in a percentage of the population. The program was therefore terminated in December of the same year. When everything was said and done, only the one person ever died from the virus.
Originally we were hearing reports from all over the world that hundreds of people had contracted and died from the disease. However, the World Health Organization is saying this morning that there are only 7 confirmed deaths world wide caused by swine flu. To put that in perspective, 20,000 to 35,000 people die each year in the US due to the contraction of the more normal strains of the flu. The combinatio of flu and pneumonia is the 7th leading cause of death in the US. The fact that we have gone nearly a week with misleading news stories is just another sign that the media groups in the US need a serious overall. Why can't we just get reports of things as they really are?
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2 comments:
I hope you don't mind if I comment on your blog, but I think it's really ironic how people mention a death because of obscure causes and then they panic, but if the cause of the death is well-known or understood, it doesn't matter. Think of the main major causes of death in the US: car accidents, heart attacks, strokes, cancer, etc. Ironically, people don't react if Americans die of these normal, even preventable, causes; instead they react when people die of UNKNOWN causes. Intuitively, I would think that this is because they want to prevent the deaths and they can't without knowing the causes, however, this is false. Even knowing that obesity, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, smoking, not getting checked for cancer, not wearing a seatbelt, speeding, etc increase the probability of death significantly most people don't change their behavior. Therefore, I can only conclude that Americans don’t actually want to cure disease and stop death, we just want to know what’s killing us and that there is something we could do about it. Simply put, Americans just prefer to die of known, preventable causes.
All comments that are relevant and clean are welcome.
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