Albert Camus and the avian flu

The UK's latest avian flu scare, centred on the Bernard Matthews turkey farm in Norfolk, seems to be over. Restrictions on the movement of livestock in the area were lifted last week. The media, after briefly trying to blow the event out of proportion (favourite headline: "Bird flu may be in our shops" -- Daily Mail) have moved on to other, more promising crises. The only long-term victim is likely to be the Bernard Matthews brand. Given what has been learnt about its production methods, and about some of the bizarre and cruel activities at the plant, such as turkey baseball and "bagpiping", it's unlikely that too many tears will be shed for it.

I wrote when the "crisis" was at its height that the way it had been handled by Bernard Matthews, the Government and the media did not offer much hope for how things would pan out if a really serious avian flu outbreak occurred. By chance, a couple of weeks ago I found my very scruffy copy of The Plague, by Albert Camus, which provides a sharply contrasting view of a serious health crisis. The book is fiction, and can be read as an allegory for the Nazi occupation of France. However, it's based on a real outbreak of bubonic plague in the 1940s in Oran, Algeria (Camus' home town) and so has a reasonable kernel of hostorical accuracy. It's also a damn good read, though the subject matter can be a bit harrowing at times.

The striking thing about The Plague is the effort everyone in Oran makes to carry on as normal in the most difficult of circumstances. The city is quickly cut off from the outside world -- no trains, no mail, nobody allowed to leave -- and the death toll quickly mounts to hundreds per week. Yet people continue to go to work, the trams still run, cafes and cinemas continue to function. There is no more than minimal civil unrest, even as the outbreak stretches on toward a full year. Doctors and other medical personnel perform heroically, and volunteer groups spring up to carry out sanitary tasks that are beyond the capacity of the government.

It's hard to visualise such a stoic response in today's UK -- or anywhere else for that matter. Companies are expecting as many as 40% of their staff to stay away from work if their is a flu pandemic; doctors are warning of violence as people lay siege to hospitals; and there are fears of civil unrest if public services or food supplies become dangerously stretched. It should all make for some great headlines in the tabloid press -- assuming, of course, that anyone makes it into the newsroom.

Camus, who would today be called a liberal humanist, ends his story (when the plague simply peters out) on a positive note: "to state quite simply what we learn in a time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise". Well, maybe. The quote that stays with me occurs much earlier in the book, as Camus is describing the initial unwillingness of the population to grasp what is going on: "stupidity has a knack of getting its way". Indeed so: in fact, these days we seem quite keen to put it in positions of authority.