Aselin

I don’t want to catch the Swine flu. For that matter I don’t want to catch bird flu, monkey rash, horse pox or any other mutant strain from an animal-kingdom inspired ailment.

I am torn on the efficacy of how we’re dealing with the potential pandemic. Media outlets proffering pseudo restraint as they try to frame this outbreak as newsworthy. So far, we have about 165 confirmed international Swine flu deaths. Tragic. But we should also keep in perspective that worldwide estimates put plain old regular flu deaths between 250,000 and 500,000 annually, in the US numbers are about 35,000.

The challenge in sifting through all this information is trying to figure out what to do. I’m an ‘action item’ girl. So, do I pull my kids out of school? Do I make everyone wear a mask? Do we put our “fancy camping” practice into full time? Dig a bomb shelter? Hijack a crop duster and fill it with Lysol?

Apparently the best thing we can do is wash our hands and cough into our sleeves. Sad when it takes the threat of a major pandemic to get us to exercise our manners.

For you longtime readers, I’ve taken you down this road before. But good grief people, how hard is it to demonstrate basic hygiene and courtesy? It would be fascinating if this virus were spread by some interesting mechanism like - only people who lick shoes will contract it. Or, no rubbing the insides of your elbows underneath sink faucets. Sadly, we would still have media running the same interviews over and over again with ‘health officials’ telling us not to do these things.

We get on our high horse of hygiene as we cringe at third world living displayed on the travel channel. People living in huts made craftily out of mud and poop. Sleeping in beds made of leaves and animal bones. The fact is, even with all our fancy indoor plumbing and soap, we’re just as gross as the next guy. As this year’s pandemic is the Swine flu, which is really a mutant strain of the Avian flu, the reality is that next year’s outbreak will be a genetic morph of the Swine flu.

Let’s see, birds become pigs become... I know, next year it will be the Yak flu! Although I think I’ve already had that one.