I guess it's about time I commented on this. Frankly, I don't know where to start. As everybody knows, the papers have been fileld with alarming reports recently about the swine flu, first discovered in Mexico a couple of weeks back. And now, for some reason unknown to me, the entire world is freaking out. The interesting thing is that if you bother to thionk a little for yourself and go beyond the panicky, black bold lettering of the fronts of the newspapers, you'll realize that this is no different from a regular flu. That's it. And, just like with the regular flu, it is only potentially (and I say potentially) deadly if you're old and sick witha weak immune system, or a small child. So WHY, then, are grown ups of all ages freaking out? Do you see small children and people in elderly homes panicking? No, because they know better than to worry about the media wanting to sell papers. It is just the flu. It's not the Black Plague and it's not Malaria. It's no big deal. But as always, the big masses swallow every word that's being spoon fed to them without thinking.

When doing a picture search on Google for the word "swine", every three pictures or so is showing people with masks on. The right wing parties in America are using this as an excellent opportunity and excuse to blame the swine flu coming to their country ont he illegal Mexican immigrant, hence suggesting the closing of the borders. In Iraq, the pigs of a local zoo are being put down, here in Sweden hygiene masks are flying off the shelves and in Egypt, thousands of pigs are being slaughtered. That particular thing seemed odd to me untill I remembered that most Egyptians are Muslim, hence consider pigs as "unclean" and will not eat them. Their government were quite soon forced to admit that they were only using the swine flu as an agenda to get rid of the animals. People are panicking for absolutely no reason and it's baffling to me. No one buys surgical face masks to protect themselves from the normal flu, so why now? I'll tell you why; because there hasn't been much int he news for the past couple of months apart from the echonomy. We need something to wake people up, something that will make them start to consume again. Consume fear, consume facial protection, consume papers, consume Tamiflu...whatever, as long as they consume.

Green Day released a song called "American Idiot" a couiple of years ago. It was written with George Bush and the American people in mind but some parts fit the current state of the world quite well...heard it the other day and this line stood out to me:

"Welcome to a new kind of tension
All across the idiot nation
Where everything isn't meant to be okay
Television dreams of tomorrow
We're not the ones meant to follow
For that's enough to argue

Don't want to be an American idiot
One nation controlled by the media
Information age of hysteria
Calling out to idiot America"

People are staring themselves blind at the scale of which the spreading of a disease is measured and freaking out by the fact that it's being raised a notch, but no one has bothered to find out what that scale actually means. Level five, for example (also note that this is one step away from being at the absolute top of the scale, making six as bad as it can possibly get) means the flu has spread to two countries. Two. Out of more than two hundred. See any need to panic yet? This is just another false alarm to generate mass hysteria. Four years ago it was the bird flu, and who in our part of the world even thinks of it now? No one; because the media stopped reporting on it, even though it is still as common in Egypt now as it was then. If it's not in the paper, people forget.

For your information; the swine flu is considered relatively high in contageousness but low in aggressivity. This quote from professor Angus Nicoll from the ECDC influensa program, says it all:

"We will most likely see the same pattern in Europe as we do in the States with increased cases." According to professor Nicolls, this will lead to some ending up in hospital and some dying:

"It happens every year during flu season."

I rest my case.