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NoH20
By James Claire |
When I was young I heard a term that made no sense to me at all — the silence was deafening. What a stupid thing to say, I thought.
But as we enter the second half of 2010 I have to say that the disappearance of one subject from all media on the planet has become so deafening that I just have to cry “halt!”
 My ears cannot stand the silence any longer. What did happen to H1N1, or the Swine Flu? Why is it that no one talks about it, when in 2009 it was ALL we discussed!
Children were inoculated, schools were shut, face masks were worn and the world was in the grip of a potential calamity.
Yet with the stroke of midnight on December 31, the subject disappeared from sight and mind. Truthfully, I’m glad the papers are filled with other news topics and the fact is, there has been plenty to write about this year.
Recalls of millions of cars, earthquakes, tsunami warnings, snow storms and heavy winds in Europe, oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico, even floods in the UAE.
What concerns me most is that the silence means one of two things occurred last year — profiteering or overreaction!
Did pharmaceutical companies scare us to ensure governments put in huge million dollar orders during an economic downturn for a cure of something that really was not there? Or did the planet overreact to something that was not as serious as we were lead to believe?
In the Dr Seuss story, Horton Hears a Who, I am sure that the ‘who’ referred to was not the World Health Organisation. Although with events in 2009, the story of Horton and his pint-sized friends, who just wanted to be heard, really has come to be a little alarming. Perhaps, like in the story, the World Health Organisation thought that by drawing attention to themselves, they would get better funding.
Does the World Health Organisation not have a greater responsibility to all of us, than to simply remain quiet about the subject now? How is it that something once deemed so bad can just be forgotten? Did I miss the cure? Did I sleep through that front page headline? Or did the pharmaceutical companies make their profits and are currently concocting the 2011 version. Let me save them the time!
There is a new disease that many of you may be inflicted with and, for just BD5 per dose, I can cure your headaches, shortness of breathe and dizzy spells.
Commonly, your condition is known as NoH20 and the cure, well, it’s a bottle of clear liquid sustenance. Some witch doctors will call this dehydration but you should be more concerned.
If you do not drink two litres of my medication a day you will always have headaches, especially as the temperatures rise.
Okay, okay, so I’m joking. What started as flu, became a supposed pandemic, labelled Swine Flu and, when that drew the indignation of pork producers, it was relabelled H1N1. We are more scared when it sounds scientific after all!
But if H1N1 wasn’t as serious as we were led to believe, then nothing has changed from the days of snake oil sellers on the American prairies of the Wild West.
Schools and businesses were closed yet this deadly plague killed 7,000 people globally. I agree, a terrible figure, but put it into perspective.
More than 40,000 women die from breast cancer in the US, one million people commit suicide each year and US road fatalities average 100 people a day.
Has the World Heath Organisation banned the outdoors? Are we closing highways? Have we developed a breast cancer cure for that matter? NO.
But the result was we closed schools and spent thousands of dinars on prevention. Almost daily, more people die on Bahrain’s roads. Do we stop people from driving?
Certainly, prevention is better than the cure.
But I am scared of the opposite, a little fable that mother taught me as a child, about the boy who cried wolf. I fear we may just regret our overzealousness on H1N1 in future years.
If something worse comes about, people are more likely to say, “I’ll wait and see if it gets worse, then worry”. Folks will be slower to don masks, they will think twice about injections. In general, we will wait to see if the young boy of Aesop’s fable tells another wolf story.
Sadly by the time the truth is realised, the Black Death of the 1800s is going to look like a sneeze at Woodstock.
As Horton vowed to prove, no matter how small you are, you deserve to be heard. Sadly, the danger is, next time, there may be no-one listening.
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