essay 2

What am I sick with again?
Every year the flu season marks the beginning of a time where we our country goes into pandemonium. Everyone prepares themselves as well as possible for the flu by getting vaccines, washing their hands, and by completely exiling those that have already been affected. However, this year there was a slight difference with people’s perception of what will happen with this coming flu season. Panic was struck into people causing people to take some normal precautions as well as some extravagant ones. What were some of these precautions that were not typical to prior flu seasons one might ask? Well some people thought that by not purchasing pork products the possibility of becoming infected might decrease. Some people might ask “what does not buying pork have to do with reducing the chance of the flu?” but, if you weren’t aware of it, there was a “swine flu” outbreak two months ago thus causing all of the pandemonium. The thing that people back then didn’t realize is that in reality there was no swine flu outburst and instead it was a H1N1 pandemic. So how exactly did this “swine flu pandemic” arise when in truth it was only a H1N1 outburst?
The original “swine flu” outbreak originated in Mexico with the death of sixty eight people in April. Scientist began to uncover the cause of this and found that those infected and that have died had strains of a virus H1N1 that is very similar to that which is found in a swine flu. With that handful of information the media took an approach which was now able to broadcast to the entire world that there has been a swine flu outbreak. During this time every time you visited CNN or The New York Times, all you would see is “Shutdown of schools caused by the swine flu or swine flu fears”. Everywhere you looked you would see the words SWINE FLU in black bold print. With this sudden spike in cases of the so called “swine flu” many people began to become weary of buying pork products. This entire situation was not helped with the perpetuation of swine flu fear by many other websites. There were some articles that were published by smaller news stories that did not even mention H1N1 and instead only mentioned the swine flu pandemic. Headlines like” U.S. Swine Flu Deaths Now Estimated At 4K” and “President Barack Obama Declares Swine Flu A U.S. National Emergency” only increased fear and forwarded the idea that there was really a swine flu pandemic. However, as time progressed there was an almost immediate change from headlines including swine flu to H1N1.
Changing the outbreak from a swine flu to a H1N1 outbreak was a movement that was started under the pork industries. With the sudden decrease in pork sales the industry was feeling a real large hit to its sales. The industry already knew that the so called swine flu pandemic was really a H1N1 pandemic which is something similar to the swine flu. With that the industry pushed scientist to reemphasize the fact that it is a H1N1 pandemic and not a swine flu pandemic. By this time the press sphere was making a turn and going back to the original sources of information. This 180 turn was then accepted by the large media companies which in turn was then relayed to the readers.
With the almost sudden change of names of swine flu to H1N1 influenza there came much confusion of what was occurring. Many people began to wonder whether there were two pandemics going on at once. With two different virus names being discussed in the media, a simple misconception was a result that should have been obvious. Before this change many articles stated that the H1N1 string was of the same family from swine flu. Media sources makes many correlation of the swine flu with H1N1 as seen in the proceeding example “More than 2,700 other patients worldwide are believed to be suffering from the virus that government officials call by its technical name, 2009 H1N1.” Even though there were many obvious statements that the technical name of the swine flu was in fact H1N1, many still did not see the correlation between the two. To clarify this CNN and other larger media sources responded with articles that blatantly told the difference between H1N1 and swine flu. Now the next big headlines that were published included “Stop Calling It Swine Flu!” and “U.S. officials want 'swine' out of flu name”
Once all of this was said and done everything went back to normal. News media sources simply continued to propagate the H1N1 scare keeping the pandemonium alive and strong. As we can see many media sources took an approach towards this entire H1N1 situation. Instead of forwarding the correct things, many articles got warped into talking about swine flu instead of the H1N1. Since the larger sources said that this was a swine flu pandemic, much of the smaller sites simply forwarded their articles from these larger sources which further increased the use of the term swine flu.
The entire time this situation was occurred my outlook of what was happening was somewhat biased against the news websites. To me it seemed like there was a major up play on the entire issue and still is being up played. Up until Nov 12 (for the year 2009 only) CNN reports that there has only been 3900 deaths caused or related to H1N1. Now even though 3900 people are a lot of people in reality it isn’t as severe as compared to the regular flu. WrongDiagnosis (A website with good credentials) states that the US has roughly 20,000 deaths that are caused and related to the flu. Even though the H1N1 has only been for eight months, there has been an average of 500 deaths per months due to the H1N1, while compared to an average of 1600 deaths due to the common flu. The flu accounts for three times the amount of deaths compared to the H1N1 (this correlation shows us that we should be much more worried about the common cold), but what does the news propagate into our media the most? That’s right H1N1 seems to be a larger story compared to the flu which in turn makes many people forget about the common flu. Much of this has to deal with how much attention the media can get from the people. Who wants to hear about the common cold when you can hear about how the H1N1 has claimed four thousand? Or even better, what headline sounds better “Out Break of the Swine Flu Erupts in Mexico” of “Out Break of the H1N1 Erupts in Mexico”. Obviously people are going to want to hear about the swine flu just because they know what swine flu means and not H1N1.

http://pagingdrgupta.blogs.cnn.com/2009/09/11/stop-calling-it-swine-flu/
http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/04/24/swine.flu/index.html
http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/04/29/swine.flu/index.html
http://www.wrongdiagnosis.com/f/flu/deaths.htm