Sunday, March 23, 2008

March 23 Flu Update

Bird flu may have crossed over into Turkey....this is a sketchy report, however.

posted by Orange @ 11:21 PM

1 Comments:

At 6:16 PM, Blogger Wulfgang said...

Orange;

I had a very interesting discussion this past weekend with some acquaintance’s at a family gathering on the subject of bird flu and the likely hood of a pandemic. Almost unanimously, they said the same thing: there were so many “natural disaster movies” out of Hollywood on TV and at the movies these days – for example, meteors striking the earth, global warming, pandemic diseases (i.e., “I am Legend” with Will Smith), earth quakes and ice age predictions – that it was depressing, and they were “tuning them all out”. They went on to elaborate that a year or two ago, they were concerned about an influenza pandemic like 1918, but when they realized that “only a few hundred people actually died from it” and it was primarily a bird disease, they stopped worrying about it when nothing happened. Besides they said, “there’s nothing you can do to prevent a disaster like those if they happen and it probably won’t happen in our lifetime”.

Could it be that we are a victim of our own mass media and Hollywood hype-ster’s, who have overplayed the pandemic disease threat too early, too much and too long ? Maybe Marshall McLuhan, the well known 1960’s author of the “Medium is the Message” was right… the dominant communication media of our time will shape the way humans think, act, and ultimately perceive the world around them. McLuhan also advanced the theory of the ”Global Village”, as I recall, that postulated that the media would bring humanity full circle to an industrial analogue of tribal mentality and perpetuate an “age of anxiety”.

I don’t know any more than anyone else when an influenza pandemic will actually hit, but judging by the folks I talked to and their complacent attitudes… it better be a “mild one”.

Wulfgang

 

Post a Comment

<< Home