Thursday, April 30, 2009
The best health warning
I hope Simon Jenkins is right about swine flu being "a panic stoked in order to posture and spend". I'm not in a position to decide. I can only take comfort in the fact that whenever the mass media decide to make a big deal of something happening in an area with which I'm familiar they first over-simplify the case, then over-state it and quickly get bored with it.
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Did anybody get SARS or bird flu? Not that I recall. Yet for a while we were all going to die.
ReplyDeleteFor good measure, I think we should again have the tanks parked outside Heathrow.
ReplyDeleteI'm probably inclined to agree that it's over-cooked by a sensationalist media. However, I was surprised to read Ben Goldacre on the Bad Science blog http://www.badscience.net/2009/04/parmageddon/, whose views on other topics I respect, saying that, actually, it is a risk. His point is that if it turns out to not be a major catastrophe Simon Jenkins et al will not have been proved right, just lucky. Food for thought.
ReplyDeleteI take comfort from the fact that I can't take it seriously because every time I hear the words "swine flu" on the news my brain translates it into the voice of Inspector Clouseau. The Peter Sellers version obviously.
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