Amanda Ripley Author of The Unthinkable

YOU GOTTA LOVE A POTENTIAL PANDEMIC WITH A NAME LIKE SWINE flu. Takes no prisoners. Very old world.

But so far, the reporting on swine flu has been very new world: reactionary, shallow and lacking context. That’s a shame since context is all that really matters in this story.

So let’s break it down:

The Numbers:

The numbers are not impressive unto themselves so far. About 20 cases in the U.S., with no deaths and only one hospitalization. That number will go up as everyone starts paying more attention—and identifying more cases. But for now, this is a pretty mild flu in the U.S. (By comparison, about 36,000 people die of regular flu-related causes in the U.S. each year.)

In Mexico, the numbers are more dramatic—although no one really knows what they are yet. The process of identifying the specific strain is maddeningly slow. But it’s safe to say that there has been a significant uptick in the number of serious pneumonia cases, and most of the patients identified so far appear to be under 50. So the strain in Mexico seems to be much more virulent, and no one really knows why yet.

Why This Matters:

The reason why all of this matters—and why the U.S. has declared a public health emergency—have to do with the behavior of the virus. So the numbers are not the main event, even though the media will obsess over the numbers (because what else is there to do?).

OK, so to put this in context: we are all waiting around for a pandemic flu to hit. Or we should be. In the past 100 years, Americans have endured three pandemics—in 1918, 1957 and 1968. As the American Public Health Association puts it, “We’re overdue for another pandemic. It’s not a question of if, but when.”

What is a pandemic flu? And does it look like this?

A pandemic flu is different from the regular flu. A pandemic flu happens when a new virus spreads around the world, causing serious illness and spreading easily from one human to another. It’s a big deal because it can kill many thousands of people (and shut down economies).

So that hasn’t happened yet here, and it probably won’t. But swine flu is worrisome for two reasons.

First, this is a new virus. It has genetic characteristics not seen in U.S. swine flu before. This matters because it means we don’t have a lot of immunity to this virus.

Second, this flu is spreading without contact with swine. That is alarming because it means it could be very efficient in moving through communities of humans. BUT it is not the first time swine flu has spread without any swine involvement.

What does any of this have to do with pigs?

Pigs are a nasty petri dish for flu because they can get both bird and human strains of flu. That means they can then act as a test tube for creating brand new viruses—to which we humans have no immunity.

Are we all going to die?

No. Well, yes, eventually. But for now, we just don’t know if this is the much-awaited Big One. A useful literature review from 2007 found a 14% fatality rate in past cases of swine flu. Whether that means anything about this strain, we don’t know. (By comparison, during the worst week of the 2007-2008 season, the regular flu had a mortality rate of about 9%.)

We do know that it appears to be receptive to drugs, which is great news. The sooner you get on these drugs after you get sick, the better. And a vaccine may be possible, but it will take at least a few months, according to the CDC.

What are the symptoms?

Same as a regular flu—fever, cough, chills, sore throat, aches, pain, general misery. Possibly vomiting or nausea.

What can we do?

Sounds simple but it can make all the difference: Wash your hands—and take your time. Cover your mouth when you sneeze. Stay home if you are sick. If you are the boss of other humans, encourage them to stay home if they are sick.

Two sites with the most useful information so far:

Clinicians’ Biosecurity Network (run by the Center for Biosecurity at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center)

CDC Swine Flu Investigation

Roll Call has a nice item on the latest attempt by a member of Congress to use homeland security money as a party favor:

“House Homeland Security Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) is seeking earmarks worth millions of dollars for homeland security projects at the small Mississippi college that he attended, though the school could not explain what the earmarks are for and does not yet appear to have the capacity to provide the services that Thompson wants to fund.”

Wildfires near Myrtle Beach are putting quite the damper on spring break.  In what could be the worst wildfire to South Carolina since 1976, 2,500 people in a four-mile stretch have been ordered to evacuate.  Despite hundreds of firefighters working to get the blaze under control, officials fear they won’t have the fire contained by the weekend. The fire’s cause remains unknown, and MSNBC reports today that countless homes and golf courses sit in areas prone to wildfires.  We won’t know the extent of the damage until the worst has passed, but you have to wonder if shocked locals will examine future development with today’s wildfires in mind.

I’m thinking it’s no coincidence that I woke up yesterday wishing I lived in Hawaii (here in the DC metro area, we’ve been having a ton of that April rain) and was greeted with the news that where you live impacts your mental health.

According to a new study, the differences between geographic location and mental health were so great that even the researchers were surprised.  The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention surveyed more than 1.2 million people, concluding that where you live determines whether you experience Frequent Mental Distress (FMD), defined as “having 14 or more days in the previous month when stress, depression and emotional problems were not good.” Apparently, those of us who live in Hawaii are the least stressed, whereas our counterparts in Kentucky experience the highest rate of FMD (only 6.6 percent of Hawaii residents reported FMD, as opposed to 14.4 percent of Kentuckians).

So, before you finally make good on your dream to move to a deserted island, know that you’re not alone.  Many Americans, no matter where they live, have been experiencing mental distress lately (10.2% of adults reported frequent mental distress in the period from 2003-2006, up from 9% in 1993-2001).

I’ve been thinking about why it is we are so obsessed with predicting disasters—over and above preventing them. What is so magical about a forecast? The answer may have something to do with the way the brain is wired. The brain loathes uncertainty. It’s a survival skill, except when it isn’t. We like patterns, which helps explain why we like music and storytelling. But we fear things we can’t predict. So we read horoscopes or watch CNBC—or sell all of our stocks when the market is low—just to stop the itch of the unknown.

In 1990, a scientist named Dr. Iben Browning predicted that the Missouri
town of New Madrid had a 50-50 chance of having a major quake on or around
Dec. 3. As the date approached, The Commercial Appeal began running a daily
“Quake Watch” series. Reporters camped out in the tiny town. Schools closed and supermarkets ran out of candles. The date arrived and nothing happened.
Browning died, his reputation in tatters, the next year.

It’s time to resist the seduction of the prediction, just as we resist our
brain’s other bad ideas. It distracts us from the real work we need to do.
Disasters happen every year, more or less on time. The true test of a
civilization is whether we take every reasonable precaution ahead of time.
As the futurist Joel Barker once said, “The ultimate function of prophecy
is not to tell the future, but to make it.”

Last week’s magnitude 6.3 earthquake in L’Aquila, Italy, triggered a flurry of earnest but confused conversations around the world. Why, TV reporters asked the experts, can’t we predict earthquakes by now? And the scientists humbly explained, as they do after every earthquake, that it remains impossible to know exactly when and where the earth’s plates will slip. Despite millions of dollars and decades of research, it’s very hard to do.

Then came alarming news: an Italian scientist did indeed predict last
Monday’s quake, it turns out! But no one listened to him. Gioacchino
Giuliani had predicted that a quake would strike a town more than 50 km
south of L’Aquila—several days earlier. He based his forecast on an
increase in emissions of radon gas in the area, a theory which has not been
proven to be reliable.

A travesty, or so it seemed. But let’s pause for a moment: if we could
predict an earthquake, what exactly would we do? Let’s say we knew a
magnitude 7.0 earthquake might hit Los Angeles in the next 30 days. Would
we tell people to evacuate Los Angeles—for a month? Or, if they stayed, to
remain inside and stop driving? In Los Angeles? And what if, like Giuliani,
we got the location wrong? So millions of people fled Los Angeles for…the
epicenter of the quake?

Now imagine that we only had 45 minutes warning of a possible earthquake.
If we were good—really good—we might be able to get a meaningful message on
the airwaves in time. We might be able to remind people to duck, cover and
hold if the shaking starts. We could tell them to stay inside and not
drive. And the warnings would prevent some casualties.

But the truth is, with earthquakes (and hurricanes, fires and floods), the
biggest challenge is not forecasting—not anymore, not in the developed
world. Yes, it is nice to know when the ground is about to shake and the
sky is about to fall, but the hardest problem by far is what to do next—and
how to motivate people to do it.

The final frontier is not picking a date for the apocalypse; it’s getting
people to bolt their bookshelves to the walls and buy earthquake insurance
in advance. The challenge (in Italy and everywhere) is enforcing serious
building codes, the kind that prevent schools from collapsing in even the
worst-case scenarios.

After all, we predicted Hurricane Katrina ad nauseam before it happened.
The New Orleans Times-Picayune predicted it in a five-part series in 2002.
The federal, state and local government predicted it in a detailed training
exercise called Hurricane Pam, conducted in 2004, one year before Katrina.
There was really nothing surprising about how that hurricane played out
(except maybe that the death toll was lower than many had predicted).

And we can sort of predict earthquakes, too. Ready? OK, over the next 30
years, the probability of a major quake occurring in the San Francisco Bay
area is about 67%, according to scientific estimates. Done. The real
mystery is not about the earth’s crust but about us—and whether we will do
everything we can to prevent it from being a catastrophe. The strength of
our houses and our roads matters more than the intensity of the tremor.
That’s why an earthquake in California can kill 63 people, while one of
roughly comparable intensity in Pakistan kills 100,000.

“Fight or Flight”...and a few of my other favorites. Check out my piece on the mythology of disasters in the Times (of London).

Got any others you’d care to add? (Is this not the most fun party game of all time? Come on, admit it.)