PRESENT TENSE:YOU WILL no doubt remember the anthrax attacks of late 2001, and might recall just how many scares there were in Ireland at the time. There were 180 incidents in all. None actually involved anthrax. The best example? A post office on Inishturk was closed down, searched and finally given the all-clear when it was confirmed that, no, a terrorist had not identified a rural post office on a small island off the coast of Co Mayo as just the spot to open a new front in the clash of civilisations.
For a host of obvious reasons, the outbreak of swine flu is not the anthrax scare, not least because swine flu has been confirmed as having arrived here. But why is it hard not to suspect that the reaction has been similar?
Even as the flu finally landed here, it was difficult not to be blasé about it. Where there had been reports of tourists bringing the flu from Mexico to, for example, Scotland or New Zealand, it seemed that the victims experienced little but mild physical discomfort and a chance to catch up on their reading in an isolation ward.
Swine flu is clearly a serious story – as were the stories about bird flu, Sars and the anthrax-tinged envelopes. But just how serious it is has become somewhat lost amid the focus on the worst-case scenario. From the outset the coverage has said a lot about the uncertainty the virus has brought, but not always while contextualising the risk. It has illustrated the giddiness a “killer bug” always brings; the deliberate jettisoning of perspective. Although, this time, a backlash has come against the hysteria. And it has in part come from the media itself.
Globally, the story began with the by-now predictable mix of hysteria, fact and a tingle of apocalyptic excitement. The exaggeration came even from the likes of the BBC. On Wednesday night, it said that there was “no need to panic” – an assertion that might have seemed a little more sincere if the reporter hadn’t just been talking about the millions of potential deaths. Or if another reporter hadn’t done a piece to camera from Mexico, while wearing a mask and standing in front of a big empty field. Or if they hadn’t shown parents frantically grabbing their kids from a school where a girl had been affected – a girl who at that moment was at home, recovering in front of daytime telly. (Reassuring news, surely.)
Such coverage continues a pattern of behaviour familiar from previous outbreaks. There is calming coverage from many outlets, but not enough to stop the rampant spread of words such as “terror”, “fear”, “panic”, “killer”. Or one paper’s reaction to Ireland’s first case: “Locked away to protect us all.”
As usual, numbers are toyed with, such as the way suspected cases have been included in casualty figures, even when many of these had been discounted. This was evident in the Irish coverage, where the four people who were tested for the illness were, for a couple of days, almost being treated as victims. So much so, in fact, that one daily newspaper included an Irish flag on its list of affected countries.
As usual, the story was instantly localised. There’s no point, after all, in having a scary disease if you’re not under threat from it. As with the anthrax scare, there was a reaction in Ireland that seemed to far outstrip either the actual risk or the experience of countries where the cases had been found. As an aside, it’s ironic that it should become such a big story here, where MMR rates plummeted following spurious research linking it to autism, and struggled to recover even when the link to autism was shown to be bogus, so leading to measles outbreaks that claimed lives and the current mumps outbreak doing the rounds. It shows the strange ways in which the human mind deals with perceived risk, attempts to process it, and so often fails.
However, even as news channels and publications have continued to present the story with a certain apocalyptic giddiness, across the globe (including countries where the flu was confirmed) some within the media have been questioning their own judgement. It began with the question “do masks really work?” but was followed by the supplementary “are we getting carried away?”
This mirrored the public reaction, which has seen some people very concerned about the threat, but others now extremely cynical about the coverage. They have seen it all too often, all too recently.
Maybe the potential will be realised. Maybe people across the world will start dropping dead. Or maybe most of them will suffer little more than a few days off work. Only then will we know if it’s been a big splash about a relatively small problem so far, for at least the fourth time this decade. Should swine flu die down, though, it will be interesting to see if there is restraint in future coverage of outbreaks. I’d guess not. Because if there is one thing the media has always had a long-term immunity to, it is outbreaks of doubt.
shegarty@irishtimes.com
