An Underlying Reason for Our Fear of Exotic Flu's
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I want to preface this article by stating that I know that swine flu and avian flu are indeed real and actual virus' that can and have caused the death of thousands. So, from that standpoint they are indeed tragic. However their mortality figures pale in comparrison to other pressing illnesses.
So, to my point.
I believe the hyper-attention that exotic flus, like the swine and bird, reveal a latent xenophobia and fear of foreigners among the western nations. I say this, because in poorer foreign nations it is not uncommon for thousands of people to die daily from illnesses like dysentary, dengue fever, malaria, yellow fever, and typhoid fever. These illnesses are severe and debilitating for the countries and peoples in which they occur, but from a western and modernized standpoint they are contained and rarely, if ever, show up in our countries.
This is not the case however with the swine flu and the avian flus. They have the possibility and ability to move beyond the boundaries of the nations from which they originate. In the case of the most recent strain of swine flu, in Mexico; or the avian flu found in south-east asia.
At a subconscious level these flus represent the possibility of unchecked infiltration/immigration of the global south and it's cultures into the global north and it's predominately white culture. It is because of this latent xenophobic fear of the other, of the foreigner that we find ourselves largely spending billions of dollars in creating a vaccine for an illness that has killed under 4,000 people when we could have instead spent that same amount on clean water sources for resource limited peoples around the world and saved millions of lives over the course of time.
Now it could be that the swine flu mutates and comes around and kills many people in western nations, but the likelyhood of that occuring is small. For instance, many Americans who are 50 and over have already been vaccinated against forms of the H1N1 virus already, as this strain of flu is not new; and flu vaccines given in past generations included this form. There is no reason that development of this vaccine could not have taken place over a longer period of time, with less dollars, and better research and testing. The rush to market with this vaccine is largely driven by a public demand that is fueled by a latent xenophobia.