Family Life

Debbie and I discussed the current Mexican swine flu outbreak at the dinner table last night. One of my workmates is in Mexico at the moment, getting married and going on his honeymoon. Some joker at the office has closed off his cubicle with yellow Caution tape and hung a breathing mask over the cubicle partition. Several airlines have canceled all flights to Mexico, so there’s some uncertainty over how he’ll get home.

I recently finished reading The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History, about the 1918 pandemic and published in 2005. The book has many faults–it’s twice as long as it should be, it’s meandering and disjointed, and it’s irritatingly melodramatic–but the story is a fascinating read. The tragedy of millions of deaths, children orphaned, whole families wiped out; the mistakes of a blind and bumbling bureaucracy; the intentional disinformation and misdirection by the press; the complete lack of clues to any hint of a cure in the global scientific community; the severe shortage of hospitals, doctors, nurses, medicines, and ultimately coffins and burial plots. Bodies were thrown by the hundreds into mass graves. This was all fresh in my mind when the swine flu outbreak started a couple of weeks ago.

Incidentally, this particular strain of flu virus is a recombination of the North American swine flu, the European swine flu, the North American avian flu, and the human flu viruses (via Wikipedia). It’s this last component that allows it to be transferred from human to human. Despite the popular name, it’s not carried by pigs. Agricultural associations object to calling it “swine flu” because it unfairly casts aspersion on the pork industry. Mexico, understandably, objects to calling it “Mexican flu”. The World Health Organization (WHO) wants people to call it “H1N1″, but that doesn’t roll off the tongue quite so easily. Besides, H1N1 is the generic designation for the common flu (it includes the strain that produced the 1918 pandemic), and people prefer to make a distinction, to be more specific.

As in 1918, there is no vaccine for the current outbreak (although the anti-viral drug Tamiflu has proved effective). If this turns into a pandemic the best prevention is isolation and quarantine. So, that’s what we discussed around the dinner table. I’d sleep in the garage, doing all the external stuff like going to work and shopping for groceries, and Debbie and the boys would be confined to the house. We’d pass groceries, meals and laundry to each other through the kitchen door. Debbie wondered what we’d do if I got sick. We left that question unresolved.

We finished talking and there was a moment’s silence. Then Daniel (5) spoke up in a worried voice, “Are we all going to die?” Poor child! We hurriedly reassured him that it was highly unlikely but that the situation needed talking about, and paused in our meal to pray about it. We asked God to keep us safe and healthy, to protect the family from harm, and to reassure us of His care. Daniel seemed content to leave it at that. Maybe Debbie and I should have talked privately.

Worries aside, the current swine flu is nowhere near as fatal as the 1918 flu. Although the 1918 flu was highly lethal nothing has matched it since. Medical authorities don’t know how mild or severe swine flu will be, or even if it will be as bad as run-of-the-mill everyday flu, which kills one in ten. For now all we have is general hysteria fueled by mass media, and so we make plans and pray while we go about our daily lives.

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