I remember the swine flu. It came around in 1976, when I was a kid. We were all going to die.
The parallels to the 1918 influenza, which killed between 20 and 100 million people, did not go unnoticed. Soldiers fell ill at a military base. The virus attacked young people. The symptoms were particularly severe. If the flu spread, millions could die.
But it didn’t spread. In fact, only one person actually died of it. He was a 19-year-old army private who — against doctor’s orders — had gone on an 80-kilometre hike in wet, cold weather after already taking ill.
Weaker forms of the 1918 influenza virus had come back in 1957 and 1968, and the government wanted to be extra careful in 1976, which was an election year. So 40 million people were vaccinated. The flu stopped months before anyone noticed that about 500 people had died of a different disease, believed to be a side effect of the vaccine.
Why did we overreact? I think it’s because we lived in a disaster culture. We were told that a powerful earthquake would push California into the sea. Killer bees were flying in from Central America. Aliens in UFOs were kidnapping people and mutilating cattle.
The mid-1970s saw every kind of catastrophe played out in films with such titles as Earthquake and The Towering Inferno. Week after week, we saw our cities destroyed by fires, invasions, plagues of insects and marauding apes.
Like Godzilla was to Japan, these films were our self-inflicted punishment, or catharsis perhaps, for a humiliating military defeat in Vietnam; but they had their positive side.
After watching these films, as well as Emergency!, a television series about paramedics, we kids would spend hours discussing what we’d learned: Where would you be safest during an earthquake? What supplies would you need if the electricity were cut off? What would you do if you were kidnapped? How do you treat cuts, burns and accidents, and prevent them from happening in the first place?
In the years since, we were all supposed to die of a number of things — nuclear war, nuclear winter, West Nile virus, SARS, and bird flu. These disasters remained only scenarios because we had seen similar things in films — and instinctively took action to prevent them.
Real disasters have happened, of course. Earthquake happened for real in California in 1989, but the skyscrapers survived because 1970s thinking had led to stricter building codes. The killer bees showed up, too, but beekeepers, having had time to prepare, are now able to manage them.
Much is still to be learned, however. Only after the towering inferno of the World Trade Center in 2001 did people start to think seriously about how to evacuate skyscrapers. New Orleans could have been better evacuated, or protected, in 2005. AIDS is still with us 28 years after its discovery. After several years of lax regulation in the US, food scares (BSE, salmonella, hepatitis and E. coli) are now happening with shocking regularity.
As I write this, Mexico City is closed. Nearly all normal activity has stopped. The United States is waiting to see how serious the threat is, but is ready to act quickly if necessary. As President Obama explained on Monday, “This is obviously a cause for concern and requires a heightened state of alert, but it is not a cause for alarm.”
Panic? When pigs fly.
