Pandemic?!? What Pandemic?

Paranoia has taken hold in the West, particularly in Europe for the last few months. A further threat from the East - to take over from communism and to add to terrorism, mass immigration and Asia’s economic challenge - has arisen. Vast flocks of birds have taken flight from the far East, and, even now as we here in the West go about our lives, are speeding towards our shores carrying a potentially lethal virus.

Queue panic buying of the drug Tamiflu - which nobody even knows if it will be affect the avian variety of the flu virus, farmers moving their chickens inside to protect them from their wild, disease-ridden Eastern cousins, a media frenzy, and governments trying to appear to be in control of the threat. We are told that Avian Flu has been found as close as Turkey and Romania and that it is only a matter of time until it reaches our comfortable Western European homes. The virus may mutate, they warn, and come to infect the human population on a scale rivalling the outbreak of Spanish Influenza in 1918 that killed more people than World War One. They say that we could be faced with a global pandemic that could kill millions.

They say absolutely nothing about the world-wide pandemic in which we are currently engulfed. Yes, about 60 people may have died from catching bird flu, but in 2003 alone, 3,000,000 people died from AIDS. Globally an estimated 40,000,000 people are HIV positive, 25,000,000 of them in Sub-Saharan Africa alone. Perhaps it is that condition unique to rich countries, ’compassion fatigue’, but we hear next to nothing about the greatest challenge to human health of our time and seem to care even less.

Could this lack of concern about the real pandemic be because HIV strikes hardest in poor Third World countries in Africa and Asia and therefore does not seem to present a threat to the rich West in the way that bird flu potentially could? Surely we’re not so self absorbed that we’re ignoring the deaths of millions while worrying about a phantom threat to our own well-being?