Creative-i

The flu season is upon us. Which type will we worry about this year, and what kind of shots will we be told to take? Remember the swine flu scare of 1976? That was the year the U.S. government told us all that swine flu could turn out to be a killer that could spread across the nation, and Washington decided that every man, woman and child in the nation should get a shot to prevent a nation-wide outbreak, a pandemic.

This unrelenting, myopic focus on swine flu, regardless of the content, cannot help but decontextualise what is in effect a strain of flu. It doesn’t matter if the statement contains the ‘don’t worry’ caveat; what is problematic is the announcement at all. As Rob Lyons has previously pointed out on spiked, the obsession with swine flu, or A/H1N1 as the increasingly popular flu geekery would know it, effaces far more serious diseases, such as malaria. In the words of WHO, there were ‘247 million cases of malaria in 2006, causing nearly one million deaths, mostly among African children’