May 4th, 2009
The political battle growing around not-swine just-flu
As we saw last week, flu can be political.
(I caught this little piggy from the blog lagtime, which was infected with the picture by wwarby at Flickr.)
Very political. Given that I’m planning on a trip to China myself in three weeks, silliness like this, or this, is not what I need to see in my morning paper. If they learn there’s more flu in America than Mexico do I get quarantined? I don’t know.
Unfortunately the lesson governments worldwide are learning from Mexico’s recent experience is to keep quiet. This doesn’t help anyone.
The largest number of responses I got when I first wrote about this subject was from folks objecting to the association of pig factories with this disease. Antibiotics and flu viruses have nothing to do with one another, I was assured. And it’s true that pork not only remains safe to eat, but delicious.
Still, liberals are using this outbreak as a way to push back against industrial “farming” of animals. Pork producers are responding in kind. Given how the germ continues to spread (scary maps and everything) this does not appear useful.
What does appear useful is sound science, and panicky politicians are the enemy of sound science, in every system, around the world.
Bacon, anyone?
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist since 1978, and has covered technology since 1982. He launched the Interactive Age Daily, the first daily coverage of the Internet to launch with a magazine, in September 1994. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 05/04/09
