SWINE FLU 'PANDEMIC'

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins."

Unless you've been living in a cave recently, with no internet or other form of media access, you will be aware that the world is now officially in panic mode about the potential of a 'Swine Flu' pandemic.

For those of you who don't know 'Swine Flu' or H1N1, as it is officially called, started in Mexico, so perhaps it shouldn't be called 'Swine Flu' at all, but Mexican Flu. It is a form of flu virus found in pigs, hence the name, however the infection has now reportedly been passed on to humans and from there could be passed on to other humans around the world... you get the grim picture being painted.

Let's stop the hysteria and think for a moment.

What is interesting here is how the World Health Organisation (WHO) have moved so quickly to hold emergency meetings to ratchet up the threat level to phase five out of a possible six phases. Six meaning that is it potentially a catastrophic situation. This is an almost unprecedented move.

With the globe in financial meltdown and now this you could say that peoples stress levels are at about phase eight.

Interestingly though, it has been admitted that "ordinary" human flu kills about 36,000 people, each year, in the United States alone, yet there is no government orchestrated panic. No 'sky-is-falling' mentality or rush to find urgent vaccines.

Other diseases such as Ebola and TB also kill many, many thousands of people on a regular basis and, given human propensity to travel in large numbers around the globe frequently thereby spreading such diseases, why is there no out of control panic?

Remember the last time Government orchestrated mass hysteria found its way onto the media pages? Avian Flu was going to wipe us all out, SARS was going to wipe us all out, we were all DOOMED!

One enduring memory of the whole shambolic attempt to foretell the end of the world was watching politicians and civil servants who went as far as drawing up a pecking order list of VIP's to get their vaccinations, the ordinary folk were left to fend for themselves... so nothing changes really. Then it was found the vaccines were useless anyway!

But don't worry even if there were a mass out break, the vast majority of ordinarily healthy people would survive. It is extremely unlikely that humanity would be wiped out. Even the plague, otherwise known as the black death, which lasted four years, spared the majority of people and this flu is by no means of plague proportions and let's face probably never will be.

What we need to do is calm down and deal with this threat rationally. Perhaps putting our energy and money into finding a cure for the common cold and flu instead.

People have speculated that politicians motives are not exactly pure in this situation (what??).

Could this be an excuse to introduce Martial Law? Only time will tell.