East-West reactions to killer flu

 

Amazing differences between responses to Asian and American viruses, columnist alleges

WHEN A KILLER flu emerges in the east, international health watchdogs seal off entire Asian cities. But when a killer flu emerges in the west, they roll over and go to sleep.

How come? The top secret conversation between two health experts below explains why.

Q: What should world health watchdogs do when a new killer virus appears? 

A: First, ask yourself: is it in a clean city or a dirty one? Dirty cities are defined as places where most inhabitants don’t speak English, aren’t white, and don’t drink recommended brands of designer coffee.

Q: What do they drink in Mexico?

A: They grow their own coffee, so Mexico goes on the dirty list, just like Hong Kong during the SARS outbreak.

Q: But I’ve been to Hong Kong. It’s quite clean.

A: You don’t get it, do you? The dirty list simply means people who are not like us.

Q: Oh, I see. Now what?

A: Well, if the epicenter is a place on the dirty list, that is, a city in Asia or Central America or Africa, encourage panic. Get people to shut the borders. Get the media hyped up about killer pandemics. Put up travel advisories preventing anyone going. Make sure insurance companies stop coverage for those places. Most importantly, hire people to run around in radiation suits.

Q: Wow. Does swine flu give you radiation sickness? 

A: No, you fool! It just looks good. It makes people think we’re doing something.

Q: Okay. What about countries on the clean list? There are loads of outbreaks in the United States, and quite a few in Canada. What do we do about them?

A: Nothing.

Q: Nothing?

A: Yes, nothing.

Q: Oh. Shouldn’t we seal the borders and stuff?

A: Don’t be ridiculous! People in North America wouldn’t stand for that sort of thing.

Q: Shouldn’t we at least check the health of people leaving the US and Canada? So it doesn’t spread?

A: Certainly not. It would cause inconvenience. Remember SARS in 2003? When the virus circulated in Hong Kong, the city was sealed off. But when it circulated in Canada, we told everyone to calm down and not over-react. No borders were shut. No-one was expelled. Everyone was encouraged to act normally.

Q: Was the Canadian SARS virus milder than the Asian one?

A: No. It was the same thing. It killed 43 people.

Q: Sir, the swine flu virus is all over the world now. If we had taken decisive action and sealed off North America as soon as it started, or at least demanded health checks on outward bound passengers, couldn’t we have prevented this becoming a world-wide problem?

A: Yes, probably. But you have to be practical about these things. Are you honestly telling me that you would ask North Americans to cancel their golf trips, just because they have a virus that might be the pandemic that finally destroys humanity? Be reasonable, man.

Q: Sorry, sir. My excuse is that I’m feeling a bit feverish. I hope I don’t have swine flu!

A: Take a holiday. Fly to Asia. If you have swine flu, we’ll just put up some travel advisories and seal off the place. One has to take decisive action, you know.
 

 

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Comments

[Julie]

The funny thing is, the media didn't get this memo until a week or so into the swine flu episode. Up until then, they thought their job was to create panic - just like last time.

[Santox]

Your posting clearly shows the degree of prejudice the West has over Asia in responding to control measures of Swine Flu, Sars and the like. It also goes to show that the Big Boys in the big western countries are not walking their talk; but only jump to excitement when flu, etc. start in Asia. Looking forward to some travel advisories to the big western countries.

[Chamin]

I was in Singapore during the 2003 SARS outbreak. We had to get our temperature measured every morning, right on the ground floor of the apartment. If the temperature was within safe limits, we got a carbon stamp on our hands (without which we could not enter any public building). I still have a photo of that stamp.

I wonder how a US citizen would react if asked to go through that.

[fardel]

What do we do about them?
This read-you-kill-us ( ridiculous) question should not be :
Everybody in his right mind knows that one can be taken to court ( and loose the case ) if one tries to stop the West from doing things that was allowed in the past:
Asia has accepted too many pandemics from the West, like:
G I's
Atomic bombs
Poisonous drinks
Bad manners
Bad taste
Bad music
bad food
sub culture
Financial crisis
and so on......

Those pandemics have literally killed or neutralized millions:
Why would any modern politrician ( toad swimming in the murky waters of poly-tricks ) risk upsetting the Order when the West is so generously distributing such a free gift as the H1SB1,a pandemic which is so weak that it did not even cross the French borders?

Everybody knows that "dirty" people are more resistant to disease than their "clean" neighbor :
The proof ?
Mexico was reopening the schools when the US of A are still closing theirs, and the number of cases are way more numerous on the Northern side of their border:
This is a bad joke:
In this island, the Army sent in medicine and masks for doctors only.
Officially, nobody has got this virus when everybody has headaches, coughs from a non-existent disease which no official wants to talk about

[Lurker_31]

I know this site tries to be funny ha ha light stuff but i really like it when we have some hard-hitting issues like this one, which the traditional media has missed or is not willing to tackle for one reason or another.

I would have thought that since they put a Hong konger in charge of the WHO it would become more balanced, but it remains the same, much lighter touch on north America than on other countries, or at least that's my perception

[Karuna]

Strangely, the epi-center of "panic" is only in China, Hong Kong, Singapore and Japan.
Rest of Asia is going on without any major panic.

Swines and birds have lived with us for a millions of years. Do we really need to go on this high panic mode every time a virus jumps from one amimal to the other? Probability tells us that in the last few million years, these virus have jumped many times.
And statistics tells that in any given year, nearly 3.5 Million people die due to pneumonia.

[Vince A]

We have 300 cases of H1N1 here in Victoria Australia (out of 400 in Australia) and growing quickly daily

Several schools have been closed for quarantine. Seems like one new school closed per day.

People are asked not go to to work if they have respiratory symptoms (like breathing).

Since you guys are in the epicenter, just curious if any of you in Asia read anything about us?

[James]

Maybe if it were as difficult for people to get OUT of the US as it is for many of the rest of us to get IN, most of the cases which have spread to Asia and the rest of the World might have been stopped. They would have been noticed while they waited, coughing and perspiring, in the endless queues.

[Max]

Very interesting! As I was in Hong Kong last week and Japan the two previous weeks...and coming from Canada.

I can understand why authorities in Asia are concerned about the swine flue. In Tokyo only, there's 30 million people living together... it can spread quickly and you want to avoid that as much as possible.

On another hand, wearing a mask won't prevent you from getting a virus...unless you change it twice a day and are extremely careful with everything you touch... and so on.

For its part, West doesn't do enough. Laxism in USA, Mexico and Canada. There's not even a media that talks about it anymore here.

Both extremes... at some point.

One thing for sure... Hong Kong and Japan are much cleaner than many cities in North America. Let me tell you that. I'd rather be in Asia when there's a real pandemic than here...

[Sally_G]

Thnks for your honesty max, i agree, Hong kong and Japan are cleaner than most places in the west, although you wouldn't think so from the general reputation of asia and the marked over-reaction of the world's media to any disease from hear, compared to the underreaction of the media to viruses in the west

[Ricardo]

Nury, Mexico is in North America, which stretches from Canada to Panama. Central America is not a continent but a region of N America. Mexico is also a member of the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Btw, when SARS was a big deal I lived in Malaysia and travelled to Bahrain. The Bahraini immigration officer saw my Canadian passport and asked how long since I'd been in Canada. (He didn't mention Malaysia.) When I said, "two years", he waved me through. But the Bahrainis did refuse entry to others, travelling from Canada. They stopped "travellers from Canada", not "Canadians", as the press kept, wrongly, saying.

[Diago Echeverri]

what?what?

[fardel aka Faye Lipad]

I am reading the comments about this pandemic, one year later.

The whole thing was a bad joke which brought a lot of cash to the ones who started it.

[sej]

Fardel,

I don't think so... Think 1918/19, think 1957, 1968/69, plus a couple of others (Spanish Flu, Russian Flu, etc)... at a minimum, thousands of people died on each occasion. We have to be getting close to another one. Evolution in biology hasn't stopped after billions of years, how can it stop after just 40-50.

This time around, I think we were lucky, it could have been so much worse.

But a Pandemic also doesn't have to kill a lot of people to have a disasterous affect. It only needs to knock out, I think I read, something like 15% of the workforce for a week, and shelves of supermarkets (at least in Western countries) start to run bare.

On the otherside of the coin, there has been a big reliance on drugs, which has not really had a successful history in dealing with pandemics.