A swine flu potpourri

A tip of the hat to the Toronto Globe and Mail's Peggy Wente for the observation that so far in the swine flu outbreak, there are far more news articles than victims. Heaven knows what will happen in the media if we actually get a pandemic, and if the flu turns out to be serious (which are two separate issues). Anyway, there have already been some interesting stories out there, and here are a few:

* The Guardian's Simon Jenkins, who seems to be growing more urbanely bilious by the week, has delivered an excellent evisceration of the performance of politicians and the medical profession. His thesis is that both of these groups love threats like these because they can strut their stuff and prove they're in charge. In the meantime, hospital patients in the UK continue to die in large numbers from MRSA and c-diff, both of which could easily be prevented if politicains and medics got their acts together. (According to Peggy Wente, the same sort of posturing is evident in Canada, which was badly embarrassed a few years ago by the SARS outbreak).

* In the Times, Ben Macintyre attributes the emergence of swine flu to intensive production techniques for meat. The epicentre of the outbreak seems to be a pig farm east of Mexico City. The farm is 50% US-owned and supplies both Mickey D's and Subway. I imagine a lot of lawyers are dusting off their Bhopal files even as we speak.

* The 24-hour news people are up to their usual tricks. On the weekend BBC News 24 interviewed a gent who had just returned from a business trip to Mexico and was said to be exhibiting swine flu symptoms. The man in question seemed remarkably chipper and admitted his symptoms were nothing he wouldn't expect after a long overnight flight. Since we have seen neither hide nor hair of this man since that one interview, I'm guessing that jetlag is exactly what he was suffering from.

* Ryanair is a one-class airline, but that's still one more than its CEO has. Michael O'Leary has opined that the flu outbreak won't affect his scuzzy operation, since the only people likely to fall ill are "slumdwellers in places like Mexico and India". I'll tell you this, Michael: if, by some twist of fate, swine flu were to spread only on Ryanair aircraft, I for one would never need any Tamiflu.