According to WHO reports yesterday there have been 92 deaths worldwide and 12,954 reported cases. This means that ouf of the almost 13 thousand people who contracted H1N1, less than a percentile have actually died from it (0.71% to be exact.) According to other WHO and CDC reports more than 60,000 people per year die from all strains of influenza put together. This means that of the 60,000 people who die, the H1N1 strain only has a 0.15% share of the global deaths.
It goes without saying that we are all overreacting to this strain of influenza. I recently just got back from a trip to morocco. I left on May 4th, only 10 days after the swine flu hit the presses hard. Upon entry to Morocco, when I showed my U.S passport to the border police, they ordered me to see a doctor. The doctor was on-hand at the border, a friendly man, who promptly gave me an influenza test. I made sure to inform him that I had not been back to the U.S in 8 months, but it was required anyway. It boggles my mind that within 14 days of a large surge of articles about this virus that there was a required medical check at the border in morocco already. Not all countries are doing this, as the same test was not required upon re-entry to Spain.
Using my own tools on newsbubbles.org I have been watching the spread of propaganda about this "deadly" virus. My system uses a word filtration and counting system to build a matrix of interconnected words that changes over time. The system features interactive Time-Context graphs and word amplitude graphs that show the media coverage and word based context for any given printed word or phrase. The system pulls from only established newspapers and professional media articles. In my research I have found that the word "swine" became a popular word with over 800 articles per day printed within only a matter of 4 days starting on April 24th, 2009. For the next 4 days, it was the most printed word in all of the news worldwide, beating out "obama", "u.s" and many other mainstay subjects for worldwide news media. The major question I am left with is why did this virus get so much media coverage, and such a pervasive print campaign if less than a percent of the people who get it died? You can see the interactive time-context graph and coverage graph here. The top graph represents how related other words are to the word "swine" over time, the bottom represents the article count per day. The lists in the colored drop down are the most-to-least related words from the entire time period. To see some of the actual articles that are being used for source input, click on the "Go" button in the "Bubble It" search up top.
At this point, the number of articles printed has died down to about 80 per day, only 10% of what it was at the campaign's peak. In an attempt to understand why this campaign took place, I used newsbubbles to look at the words "swine" and "vaccine" together. From this search, the first subject in my trend list was "world health organization." The articles that came out of the search pointed to the fact that the WHO was searching for a vaccine, and that they would probably find one by the end of june. There were also talks of making it mandatory for the vaccine to be taken. There is no doubt that the world news media is not comprised of a collection of small independent news companies, but a worldwide organization that moves on the same front attacking from different angles. The days of the independent news writers has been long gone, and now only money talks. The only logical reason I can come up with for why the swine blitz has taken place is that SA, the WHO, the CDC, and other multinational corporations are looking to make some money off of the swine flu vaccine, of which SA already has orders and is taking more as you are reading this article.
One thing to note is that, it is not the disease itself that has crippled mexico's tourist industry as most articles claim, but the media coverage itself that followed this all-to-normal flu as if it were a harbinger of the armageddon and an international pandemic to be feared. For the entire duration of the peak media coverage of this virus, "mexico" was one of the top 3 most related words in all the articles returned. From the beginning of the "swine flu" media blitz up to today, mexico is in 7th place, preceded only by the words (in this order): official, virus, flu, health, world health organization, and school. Other highly related words to the word "swine" in the media are words like "outbreak", "pandemic", and ofcourse, "h1n1".
The reason I'm writing this is mainly because I believe that the public opinion is highly swayed by media opinion. It has been my goal to map out the context matrix of the media opinion to further understand it's relationship to public opinion. I have found positively that what the media talks about, the people talk about, and the words and concepts the media links together in it's articles, are the same words and concepts that the public links together in conversation about these topics. You can see one of my tests of this theory in relation to another media blitz from the beginning of 2009 here.
