The Swine Flu Panic of 2009 (Der Spiegel)

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Reconstruction of a Mass Hysteria

The Swine Flu Panic of 2009

Swine flu kept the world in suspense for almost a year. A massive vaccination

campaign was mounted to put a stop to the anticipated pandemic. But, as it

turned out, it was a relatively harmless strain of the flu virus. How, and why,

did the world overreact? A reconstruction. By SPIEGEL staff.

At first things did not look good for Edgar. The five-year-old boy had a high

fever. He'd lost his appetite, his throat was burning and his entire body ached.

The people in the Mexican village of La Gloria were quick to blame the pigs.

They had long been convinced that the animals were a curse. In the nearby town

of Perote, half a million hogs were being fattened for slaughter. The wind

carried the stench through the narrow streets of the surrounding villages. No

one was very surprised when Edgar fell ill.

But then, after only four days, the boy recovered. His illness disappeared as

quickly as it had started. It turned out to be nothing more than the flu, and

the people of La Gloria soon forgot about it.

'Boy Zero'

It wasn't until several weeks later that a laboratory in Canada tested a mucosal

smear taken from the boy. The results made him famous. Edgar didn't have an

ordinary flu, but had been infected with a new kind of pathogen, the swine flu

virus. Edgar went down in history as niño cero, " boy zero, " the first person to

fall ill with the new plague.

The Mexican boy's infection was mild, like an overwhelming majority of the

millions of cases that would occur worldwide in the coming months. The new virus

would probably have attracted far less attention if it hadn't been for modern

molecular medicine, with its genetic analyses, antibody tests and reference

laboratories. The swine flu would have conquered the world, and no doctor would

have noticed.

But the world did notice, largely because of high-tech medicine and the vaccine

industry. From Ebola to SARS to the avian flu, epidemiologists, the media,

doctors and the pharmaceutical lobby have systematically attuned the world to

grim catastrophic scenarios and the dangers of new, menacing infectious

diseases.

None of these diseases receives more attention than influenza. Researchers in

more than 130 laboratories in 102 countries are constantly on the lookout for

new flu pathogens. Entire careers and institutions, and a lot of money, depend

on the outcomes of their work. " Sometimes I have the feeling that people are

literally yearning for a pandemic, " says flu expert Tom Jefferson, from an

international health nonprofit called the Cochrane Collaboration. " All that's

needed to get this machinery going is a small mutated virus. "

Now turned up, the machinery was set into motion. Researchers got to work

examining the molecular structure of the virus. The pharmaceutical industry

started to develop vaccines. Government agencies laid out disaster plans. There

was only one thing that everyone was ignoring: The new pathogen was, in fact,

relatively harmless. How did all this happen?...

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,682613,00.html

Influenza and Inequality: One Town's Tragic Response to the Great Epidemic of

1918 to be published by Fanning, associate professor of sociology at

Bridgewater State College, where she has taught a class in epidemics and

society. Her newest book, which will be released in September