PIGS WILL FLY

We have received our government leaflet Important Information About Swine Flu. So that’s all right, then. I am finding that I can resist the temptation – it might be irresistible were I a few decades younger – to order extra copies (to a permitted maximum of five) in, say, Braille, Welsh, Gujarati, something called “simplified form Chinese” and “Farsi/Dari”.

I am not sure, however, whether I swallow an important part of the premise of this leaflet. That is indeed the word “important”. I have sought the “important” information supposedly contained therein in vain. A rather “important” question – you might surmise – is only posed (rhetorically, for immediate answering like an FAQ) on page 9 of the 10-page leaflet. This is “What Are the Symptoms?”

Given the customary hysteria generated by the media, this question might properly be posed, I would suggest, at the outset of the leaflet. But we toil through until the penultimate page and then read that the symptoms are these: “sudden onset of fever, cough or shortness of breath. Other symptoms can include headache, sore throat, tiredness, aching muscles, chills, sneezing, runny nose or loss of appetite” [the leaflet’s own bold]. It seems to me that people suffering from regular ’flu, asthma, period pain, hay fever, bronchitis, myocardial infarction, post traumatic stress disorder, tonsillitis, ME, the common cold, malaria, HIV, pregnancy or a panic attack could present some or all of these symptoms without having been within sneezing distance of anyone who’d ever been to Mexico. In sum, I wouldn’t feel at all comfortable seeing my doctor in the expectation that he would diagnose swine flu. The declared symptoms are way too symptomatic of fifty other conditions.

So what about pre-emptive action? Here the leaflet betrays evidence of having been penned by an academic or equally remote dweller within an ivory tower. Page 6 asks “What can I do to protect myself and others against flu?” Actually, nothing in the responses beneath directly addresses the first part of that question. Obviously, the most effective method of protecting oneself against swine fever is to give the widest possible berth to anyone who has been to Mexico or consorted with its pig-farming population in the last year or so. But I guess it would be ideologically unsound to print that.

The leaflet has a catch-all remedy for protecting oneself – “follow good hygiene practices” – but the said practices then listed all pertain to “prevent[ing] the spread of germs”; in other words, to protecting others rather than oneself: “Always carry tissues. Use clean tissues to cover your mouth and nose when you cough and sneeze. Bin the tissues after one use. Wash your hands with soap and hot water or a sanitiser gel often”.

The author of this advice has a bright and simple picture of each of us as we go about our lives. We are bowling along the street, hands free of impedimenta. We recognise with plenty of warning that a cough or sneeze is imminent. We reach into our pocket or purse to extract a tissue in good time to entrap the trauma’s effluvia. By happy chance, we are just passing a corporation bin into which we cast the now offending tissue, smiling benignly around us the while.

Oh, would it were thus. I have just begun the third week of my second cold in two months, the first having lasted three weeks, this second being worse. Both colds have been the severest I have suffered in forty years. Had I employed a fresh tissue very time I coughed, sneezed or blew my nose, I would have run through two large boxes of them each day. If we all did that, the world’s rain forests would be gone by the middle of October.

If I am out for the day, I am not going to lug two large boxes of tissues everywhere I go. What’s more, I am not going to be in a position to dispose of a soiled tissue every time I use one. If I am in the middle of a meal, a play, a bath, a round of golf, a concert, a shop, a dog walk across fields, a football match, sex, it just ain’t practical to bin a tissue straight after use. What’s more, many places – train and tube stations, shopping malls – long ago disposed of their rubbish bins for security reasons. Because it’s an almost invisible means of saving money, many councils have reduced the number of bins on streets and cut the frequency of garbage collection. It’s easy to advise “bin the tissues” if you don’t appreciate the reality of the scarcity of binning receptacles.


Your country needs you to use a tissue

Then comes the matter of washing one’s hands. Again, this is not a practical proposition if one is out and about. Public conveniences are many fewer in number than they were twenty years ago. Those that are available frequently do not provide the requisite hot water and maintenance is not so diligent that there is always some kind of soap dispenser filled and ready to dispense. The people who compile these leaflets simply have no idea what the real world is like.

The suspicion remains that the authorities are determined to demonstrate regularly that they are on top of this “crisis” because they can. That’s because they know that a pandemic of swine flu is really a very unlikely outcome. By behaving in a manner that seems diligent and comprehensive, they hope to gain credit when the concern blows over. Other crises that have materialised in the past and may do again in the future – floods, prison unrest, knife crime, a run on the banks, leaks about parliamentarians’ expenses – were not and will not be so containable. The government wants to be seen to be in control even though the forces it is pretending to manage are really rather overstated by the media.

I don’t think my friend who refers to the threatened plague as “whine flu” is very far off the mark.