Swine flu fears and the meeja

John Elder has never been one of my favourite writers at The Age. If I notice his name in the byline, I generally skip the story. If I start reading one of his articles without realising, the over-wrought prose generally turns me off within the first couple of paragraphs and a glance at the byline confirms why. I never miss anything of any importance by not reading his work – the stories are usually of the “human interest” type, where “human interest” is defined as “of interest to nobody but John Elder”.

I missed the byline on the Sunday Age article “Swine Flu Fears Not To Be Sneezed At”, but the name of the writer was repeated in the first line. For some reason I kept reading.

God. “…city on edge… recoiling… shuddering… widening of the eyes”. Well, John Elder is obviously going “batty with swine flu anxiety” and, in his usual way, is projecting those fears onto all of us. He enlists the director of psychiatry research at Monash University, and the director of the Menzies Centre for Health Policy to help him spread his hysteria.

Why are we fearful of swine flu? Apparently it’s because “the 1918 pandemic looms in people’s thinking”, according to Professor Leeder of the Menzies Centre. That’s news to me. Of course, I can only speak for myself and the few people I’ve randomly questioned on this, but the 1918 pandemic doesn’t figure at all in people’s thinking. Thanks for putting the idea there, though, John. I’m sure you’re bringing it up as an example so that we’ll be reassured:

There are stories of young people going to work in the morning and they were dead by morning tea. The fact that swine flu has some of the (genetic) components that were present in the 1918 flu is not a trivial thing.

Well, that’s just great.

What’s it to be, then John? Are we over-reacting, or are our flu fears reasonable? Professor Kulkarni says:

When the threat is something commonplace like influenza, death feels more part of our existence, and the death anxiety is more heightened. (Swine flu) has received an enormous amount of (media) attention, particularly on the action being taken … schools closed down and put into quarantine, people admitted to the ICU. We can’t live in denial.

This is most probably true, but surely this article is only contributing to the media noise on swine flu and therefore heightening the “death anxiety”, no?

I’m beginning to think that even The Sunday Age’s editors thought they should reconsider this purposeless coverage of the pandemic. When I first read the piece, I was sure that one of the people quoted in it referred to “people wearing gloves on the tram” and interpreted that as part of the over-reaction; that these commuters were wearing gloves to avoid germs. When I went back to re-read the article, thinking how stupid it was for somebody in Melbourne to overlook that people often wear gloves to keep their hands warm, I couldn’t find the article anywhere on The Age online. I searched for the terms “John Elder” and “influenza”, all three of which are in this article. This was my search result:

I had to go to google, which brought up the article I’ve linked to here. Only thing is, the reference to glove-wearing was no longer there. It’s still a very silly article without it, and perhaps I really did imagine that reference – I’ve googled and binged to no effect – but the fact that The Age itself is making it impossible to find, and that it’s very poorly structured, makes me think there’s been some hasty post-publication editing.