Fever pitch | The Guardian - David Aaronovitch [Note: This article is more than 17 years old]:
April 6, 2003 - "There are no poisonous snakes on Hampstead Heath.... So why, walking on the Heath last weekend, did I levitate at the sight of a twisted green stick across my path – I, who have never even seen a snake in the wild? It must, I reckoned, have been one of those rare appearances by the Old Animal inside, a sudden throwback to our hairy days of roaming the rift valley, alert to danger.
"I think something similar happens when – as last week – we hear about yet another deadly disease, which has killed someone in China. Boats or planes are, even now, carrying a new strain of pneumonia from the teeming Asian continent to the heart of Europe and the United States. The Old Animal, recalling past pandemics, sounds the alarm....
"Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (Sars) should not be confused with Acute Respiratory Syndrome, which was an African flu epidemic from last autumn and – frankly – is so last year (I presume that next year's epidemic will, because of this name inflation, have to be called something like Bloody Terrible Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome.) A health website describes the main symptoms of Sars as being 'high fever, dry cough, shortness of breath or breathing difficulties. Sars may be associated with other symptoms, including headache, muscular stiffness, loss of appetite, malaise, confusion, rash and diarrhoea'. All of which, as I write this, I am currently suffering from, save lack of appetite. Oh, and a rash.
"If I have somehow picked up the coronavirus behind the disease, and am not just suffering from a spring cold,... [i]t would be about time. In 1997 I avoided the Hong Kong chicken virus, which killed six people when a strain of the virus somehow 'jumped the species barrier' for the first time. A million Chinese chickens were slaughtered, and the disease was stopped. Three years later I survived the emergence of the West Nile virus, a mosquito-borne infection that led to the whole of New York being sprayed with pesticide. Since then there have been 4,003 cases of West Nile virus and 263 deaths. Nothing, however, gives me as much relief as having been spared Ebola virus, which a few years back (and courtesy of Hollywood and Dustin Hoffman) was poised to sweep the world.
"Ever since we settled down in cities and communities, we have been open to the possibility of communicable disease. And, in our folk history, most of this arises in the East, a treacherous result of trade and modernity. The Black Death is supposed to have originated variously in the Gobi desert, in Manchuria, or (best of all) 'in the depths of Asia', reaching Dorset in August 1348. The cholera pandemic that swept across England in 1832 was supposed to have entered on a ship from Hamburg, but to have started in Bengal. Latterly Africa has been fixed upon as an alternative starting place for terrible diseases. Teeming Asia or the Heart of Darkness - take your pick of which most frightens you.
"This fear of epidemics and pandemics is interesting. In psychological terms it is a way of externalising evil and badness; the nastiness is placed outside us. And there are, of course, other outside threats to our continued survival, ranging from mega-tsunamis (tidal waves which will drown New York), the currently vogueish killer asteroids and - at an individual level - alien abduction.... But none of this sci-fi stuff has quite the power of an authentic health scare. It is many millions of years since we last struck by a huge asteroid, yet within the lifetime of a centenarian we have seen one pandemic and one epidemic; Spanish flu and Aids respectively. And, in any case, our own health and its susceptibility to external threat, is a very big part of our inner lives....
"For all kinds of reasons, we are living through a pessimistic moment, and we constantly expect to be assailed by external devils. So everyone is worried despite the fact that Sars appears to be less infectious than ordinary influenza, and that the World Health Organisation expects a treatment for Sars to be available in weeks rather than months. Even so there were mutterings this weekend about what would happen if the infection enters a country like Brazil, where the health system may not be able to cope. My guess, however, is that we will be talking about Sars in five years time in the same way that we now mention chicken flu. And yet, at some point in the next couple of years, there'll be another scare....
"We are consciously creating what one sociologist, Peter Berger, has described as a 'cultural climate of pervasive anxiety'. In this climate certain groups become over-sensitive to alarms about health and lifestyle, and end up trying to do things that actually contradict each other.
"It is hard not to think about the story of the boy who cried 'Wolf!' Every now and then an Aids epidemic or an established link (such as that between lung cancer and smoking) comes up and demands action. But by then we will have stayed at home because of virtually non-existent viruses, banned GM foods on the flimsiest of evidence and taken ill-advised exercise under the supervision of ignorant trainers - and so we won't believe what we are being told. This is, I fear, becoming a time when we are all scared of the wrong-shaped sticks."
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2003/apr/06/publichealth.comment
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