Pandemic

They say journalism is the one occupation where you need to be an expert in everything. One day, you could be covering a fire, the next an election, the next a cancer fundraiser.

I agree with this, but I would also suggest that a Laurier Brantford contemporary studies student comes in a close second. In three years of that program, I've already learned and written about topics as diverse as the French Revolution, Slumdog Millionaire, and pandemics.

Thanks to that last one, I've been following the outbreak of swine flu in Mexico with a little more knowledge than the average person. In reality, I probably still don't know that much. But since I think I do, here it is.

This is not a pandemic. A pandemic, by defintion, involves people being sick in pretty much every part of the world. The only way this would likely happen would be if the virus were to spread most of the way around the globe before anybody had any idea what was going on. This swine flu was brought to the world's attention when it was still in and around Mexico, giving scientists lots of time to fight it before pandemic set in.

Not that this stops the media. They like this sort of thing. Well, sometimes. They don't like earthquakes, because those are unpredictable - they can only cover the aftermath. But pandemics, hurricanes, meteors? All well-liked, because they can all be tracked in advance and covered from more or less the beginning. I think it's three nights straight now where CTV National News has interviewed an infectious disease specialist, and each time the first question has been "is this a pandemic?", followed by "could it become one?".

The answer, by now, can't be anything other than "only if there's an extraordinary amount of human failure". We know what the disease comes from, we know where it's centralized, we know what symptoms to look for, and the public is aware of it. Were this the real pandemic - which will come eventually, and we're nowhere close to prepared for - none of this would have happened until far too many people had died.

In conclusion, OPEN YOUR DAMN PORTS BACK UP MADAGASCAR.

--Ryan