What are they saying about the pig flue in Russia?
This panic is an excellent possibility for the pharmaceutical industry, as well as the veterinarian authorities, to earn money, and the best pretext for governmental protectionism.
The danger of this new virus to spreading into Russia is – according to Russia’s Chief Medical Doctor Gennadi Onischenko – a formal pretext to create outright hysteria around a basically normal illness.
It seems not to matter that this flue virus is not especially new and has nothing to do with pigs because such horror stories lend themselves perfectly for sensational news reporting (earlier on it was bird flue or the ominous red mercury) during times where not much else is there to be reported on a worldwide scale. With such news enormous profits can be made whilst other ways of doing business at the current economic climate bring only losses.
Every day the list gets longer and longer of countries and regions from where the import of pork meat has been forbidden by Russian governmental authorities. Every day Russian pharmaceutical companies are issuing press reports with offers of “wonder drugs” to combat “this new plague” even though there are currently worldwide only about 1000 people that are actually sick with this virus and only 30 people so far actually died of it.
The worldwide panic of a global world has long since become an efficient political and financial instrument. On the eve of the Olympic Games in China was the news of the bird flue which filled front pages and was top news on nearly all important TV stations. Commentators even predicted that the Olympics may need to be cancelled because of it.
The general public though tends to replace global issues and problems with more local ones; this trait is brazenly exploited by the media and governments. People have already become used to the crisis; they know exactly that it will last for a while. New danger comes along just at the right time.
New and really important economic and political issues in the world as well as the lessening of new infections will inevitably lead to people quickly forgetting the “new pest of the 21st century”. One will have to come up with other “news” to keep people amused, support local businesses, and in general make lots of money with human fear.
