One Flu Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Tags: media, public health, swine flu | No comments | 1,642 views

These are difficult times to be recovering from any kind of flu, especially if you are literate and/or have access to any form of mass media. I am neither an epidemiologist, nor a medical anthropologist. These are ramblings literally inspired by feverish delirium!! And it is fairly deliberate too that I am writing this at a juncture when the share of media space for swine flu is decreasing. Without exonerating the Government of India for its abysmally low expenditure on public health [1], I wish someone would do a quantification of the space that swine flu got on Indian English language media. Maybe this space was rooted in the fear that the cover story in The Week was trying to articulate – the consequences of swine flu outbreak in the Indian slums. This panic was echoed by a respected Doctor Activist in a peer mailing list that I am part of – where he invoked the memories of the 19^th century plague in Europe. Reading all of this was enough to send the hypochondriac me panic-rushing to the nearest clinic – only to realize that swine flu was strictly (in those days) in the government domain…. What the #@$*? According to the latest news results for swine flu on Google[2] ( as I am keying this in) 257 people have died of swine flu of 8153 people who have tested positive – that is spread over approximately four months. In this period a total of 35,148 people have been tested for the virus. Now, let us peep at the numbers that are not being told to us – numbers regarding other infectious diseases. The World Bank tells us that TB consumes around 400000 lives annually in India alone [3]. It is further estimated that one third of the world’s population is infected by Mycobacterium Tuberculosis. The last pharmaceutical innovation in TB drugs was in 1967. And of late we have Multi-drug Resistant and Extensively Multi-drug resistant TB. Last year alone apparently 1.5 million people contracted malaria, of which 935 fatalities were reported.[4] A health activist friend of mine gives the example of the Chenchus in Andhra Pradesh, (yes the same ones that were sent to search for the debris of YSR’s copter) being on the brink of extinction because of Malaria.[5] Though largely controversial and not established firmly. Conservative estimates tell us that there were around 310000 deaths related to HIV/AIDS.[6] Now as if to make fun of all the collective hypochondriac energies that translated into the frenetic mask sales across (urban) India – Dr. Mark Lipsitch of Harvard University tells us that swine flu is comparable to seasonal flu on the scale of pandemic severity index.[7] It makes an interesting exercise to compare the headline grabbing contagious diseases in the last decade with the real killers. Severe Acquired Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), the earlier version of bovine flu, bird flu etc. (I am not deliberately mentioning chikungunya) – all of them did their little jig – and received headline space – and shining India ran helter skelter. I remember the days of bird flu in particular. The price of poultry products had hit rock bottom. Many marginal poultry farmers in Namakkal District literally threw away their stock and went broke. The big players consolidated the market. But none of that made headlines!!! Thank God that pork is a Dalit food in India – so many livelihoods have not been affected on that count. At every juncture when a global epidemic appeared on the front page of Indian newspapers, there were renewed calls for efficient and accountable Public Health System. The sustained and sensible campaign of groups like the Peoples Health Movement could never hope to grapple for the TV chat room spaces that these outbreaks demand. Messiahs that run to the nearest Corporate hospital for the smallest cough would come up with garrulous (well-deserved of course) critiques of the Indian health administration. The noise is kept up till either another disease grabs the headlines, the disease fades away from public memory or better still the disease trickles out of the Shining India living rooms to the innumerable slums – where people have no access to public or private health care!!! To cut a long story short – do not contract any form of influenza, the information age can make it nightmarish!!!!

September 25th, 2009 | Category: Media Watch | (8 votes, average: 3.75 out of 5)
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