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Swine flu and hype – a media illness
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| Parent(s) |
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| Contributor | kal |
| Last Edited | kal Apr 30, 2009 05:59pm |
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| Category | General |
| Media | Newspaper - Guardian |
| News Date | Thursday, April 30, 2009 11:00:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | First it was the emails, and the tweets. This is all nonsense about the aporkalypse, surely? Just like with Sars, and bird flu, and MMR, is this all hype? The answer is no, but more interesting is this: for so many people, their very first assumption on the story is that the media are lying. It is the story of the boy who cried wolf.
We are poorly equipped to think around issues involving risk, and infectious diseases epidemiology is a tricky business: the error margins on the models are wide, and it's extremely hard to make clear predictions.
Here's an example. In Glasgow in the 1980s, less than 5% of injecting drug users were HIV positive. In Edinburgh at the same time, it was almost 50%, even though these two places are only an hour apart by train. Lots of people have got theories about why there should have been such a huge difference in the numbers of people infected, and there's no doubt that it's fun to try and come up with a plausible post hoc rationale. But you certainly wouldn't have predicted it.
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