Remember my 2009 trend map? Well look again and you will see an Influenza Pandemic as a global risk top right hand side. Guess I got lucky. Or perhaps not. What I think we have currently is an information pandemic.
News is travelling too fast – thanks to global connectivity – and what is contagious is actually anxiety, which is moving too fast to be contained. For example, I was staying at a hotel this morning and I asked for some bacon for breakfast. I couldn’t have any. It was off the menu due to Swine Flu in Mexico. Give me a break.
Is this a problem? One would imagine it is. First this is adding to existing anxieties (the economy, climate change and so on). Second, if this turns out to be not the real thing – which, I suspect, it will – then we will take less notice when there really is a genuine global pandemic out there.
I suggest that everyone tales a couple of aspirin and calms down.
Thanks for this post. I can’t believe how ignorant and naive people are. Eating bacon has nothing to do with swine flu. It’s transmitting from human to human now, so it’s got nothing to do with swine, much less eating pork half way around the world.
Does the population at large really have such a poor understanding of biology? I blame the media, for doing what they do best. “If it bleeds it leads” they say. Hype, hysteria, and misinformation. For shame.
Perhaps it’s not that news is traveling too fast, it’s that people are just too clueless about the basics of virology and medicine in general.
I agree with both Richard and Dan. This is a perfect example when news travel too fast without any sanity check whether the information is right or wrong. Flu in Mexico is a bit different case than flu in Alaska or Sweden or Siberia.
But since fear sells in so many ways it is sometimes hard to see, what is real and what is not.
Not saying that this pandemic shouldn´t be taken seriously, but taking measures comparable to nuclear war preparation with news on different levels of WHO classification…please.