Sir Real - The Basic Paradox

http://www.canada.com/Health/concern+reason+hysteria/1555029/story.html

Cancelled school trips, passengers in Heathrow en route to Canada in face masks, Catholic priests in Edmonton recommending worshippers stop shaking hands in peace and just nod their heads instead.

As human swine flu reached 11 countries Friday, critics feared "swine flu hysteria" may spread faster than the virus itself.

We're going down a road with no road map, some say, with nothing to tell people how scared they should be. Given the lack of hard evidence, blind panic and total calm can both make sense.

Among the big unknowns: Will swine flu stay in the human population to become another seasonal flu strain? Will it die out entirely? Is the virus genetically stable as it moves from human to human? Or is it evolving, changing its properties to become more lethal?

We might be better off consulting the phases of the moon for insights, says University of Ottawa virologist Earl Brown.

But "the current trend both inside and outside of Mexico is reassuring," says Brown. "We aren't seeing explosive spread with cases of pneumonia."

New Brunswick confirmed its first case of swine flu Friday which, along with new cases in B.C., Alberta and Nova Scotia, raised Canada's total to 51 since the first cases in Canada were reported on April 26.

By contrast, 1,092 Canadians tested positive for seasonal influenza during just a single, one-week period, from March 1 to March 7.

Nearly half (47 per cent) of Canadians are concerned they, or someone in their family, might contract swine flu, according to an Ipsos Reid poll for Canwest News Service and Global National. Fifteen per cent of 1,001 adults surveyed from April 29 to April 30 said they were "very much" concerned.

On Friday, a United Airlines flight from Germany to Washington was diverted to Boston because a female passenger complained of flu symptoms. Egypt has ordered a nationwide pig slaughter. U.S. Vice-President Joe Biden said Thursday he wouldn't travel anywhere in a confined space because of swine flu.

"All the talk of pandemics just gets people worked up, when what we're looking at here is a public health problem," says Philip Alcabes, author of Dread: How Fear and Fantasy Have Fueled Epidemics from the Black Death to the Avian Flu. People are getting sick, Alcabes says. "But it's not a crisis,"

Horror fantasies about the flu are always about the possibility of a repeat of 1918 Spanish flu, he says. Images of horse-drawn carriages carrying corpses and of people dropping dead in the street have become somehow iconic in our thinking about flu, he says. "And I think that's a shame. Because there's a lot of influenza, it's a public health problem every year in North America."

It makes a lot of people sick, and it kills a lot of people, he says. "But only once in history has there been a terrible (flu) disaster, and that was 1918."

But the world was a different place. "We didn't have the science we have now," says Alcabes, associate professor of urban public health at Hunter College of the City University of New York. "We didn't have the public apparatus we have now."

Spanish flu was the worst disease disaster in American history, he says. But more than 99 per cent of the population survived it. "We can calm down and take some reassurance in the statistic that, even what was by far, by an order of magnitude, the worst single disease disaster in history, the chances of living were far better than the chances of dying, even in a day when there wasn't much to be done."

The World Health Organization has dropped the name "swine flu" for influenza A (H1N1) over worries the name was causing people to avoid pork. Swine flu hasn't been shown to be transmissible to people through eating properly handled and prepared pork products.

Changing the name is "all politics," says Tim Blackmore, a professor in media studies at the University of Western Ontario. "It doesn't serve us well at all for people to be using the world 'pandemic', to be raising rates of warnings."

The World Health Organization raised its alert level on Wednesday to phase five on a six-phase scale. "Six is what, the bubonic plague?" Blackmore says.

"There is this confluence of what we're ready to be afraid of, what's wired in and what we've become ready to be afraid of because the popular imagery has been so strong. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, basically."

It's the unfamiliar that makes us the most fearful, but the biggest risks to personal safety are the ones we can control — unhealthy lifestyles, obesity, smoking and lack of exercise.

Even then, there's no risk-free life, Alcabes says. "Nature, at random, brings death and destruction in unpredictable ways" such as tsunamis or Hurricane Katrina. "We can't all protect ourselves all the time. That's one of the maddening aspects of life."

At the Toronto General and Toronto Western hospitals, triage nurses in emergency are wearing masks and any patient who fails a "febrile respiratory survey" is put into isolation and tested.

"If this dies down in the next couple of weeks, that would be wonderful," says Dr. Anil Chopra, chief of emergency medicine program at University Health Network. "But we don't want to look back and say, we weren't prepared, we didn't take the right precautions and then learn we unnecessarily allowed this virus to spread."

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The JOURNAL profiles Steve Meacham, a Boston-based organizer who's trying to halt the tidal wave of evictions and foreclosures plaguing his community. Meacham works for an award-winning organization known as City Life/Vida Urbana, a group that's pioneered new strategies to help working people hold on to their homes in the face of intense pressure from banks.

http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/heather/bill-moyers-journal-steve-me...

BILL MOYERS: As demand grows for the Obama administration and Congress to publish the real story behind the torture of detainees -- and to hold accountable the officials responsible -- so, too, has public pressure been building to hold the banks accountable for their role in the collapse of our financial system.

That's proving difficult, and here's one reason why. Just this week, the number two democratic leader in the Senate made an extraordinary confession. Senator Durbin of Illinois has been battling for bankruptcy reform, but many banks don't want reform, and they're pushing back against meaningful change -- especially change that might help homeowners in danger of foreclosure.

On Monday an exasperated Senator Durbin told an interviewer that although, quote, "We're facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created, the banks are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill, and they frankly own the place."Let me repeat that: one of the Senate's own leaders says the banks own the place. And just yesterday, as if to prove Durbin's point, bankers killed the Senate's latest effort to staunch that wave of foreclosures, squashing a measure Durbin says would help one million seven hundred thousand Americans save their homes.

So what are regular folks to do? Well, some are picking themselves up and fighting back in one of the few forums left to them: the streets.

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