Relax. Odds are you won’t die of swine flu, and neither will anyone you know. Ongoing research on the virus suggests that it isn’t very deadly, and ordinary Americans who have not recently been to Mexico have little reason to be concerned.

Yet, if you’ve only been watching news networks like CNN for the past week, you’d think we’re all doomed. It’s not just the media: The World Health Organization raised its pandemic alert to the second-highest level last week. Even my mother, a practicing doctor, called me on Monday to tell me to avoid riding the subway. While it’s clear we’ll survive the swine flu, who knows if we can handle the mass hysteria?

Panic, of course, has risks of its own. One big danger is wasted time, which can cost businesses revenue if workers stay home out of fear. Waste can also come in the form of purchasing unnecessary antiviral drugs or face masks, which are basically ineffective against something as small as a virus, anyway (though they may keep out globs of mucus where viruses tend to be concentrated).

Another concern about panic is declining sales in industries associated with the outbreak. For instance, U.S. hog markets have been hurt recently as consumers scared about the flu are avoiding pig products. This behavior is irrational: Unlike mad cow disease, which involves prions that can stick around after death, viruses need their host to be alive and cannot survive cooking, so there’s no danger in eating cooked meat of a pig that was sick before it died. The Feds have tried to explain this to Americans and have even started calling the virus “H1N1” (after the scientific name for its strain) to protect industry, but the damage has already been done.

Fears of a pandemic can also create enmity between once-cooperative countries over who was to blame for the contagion, which could touch off a powder keg in sensitive areas like the Taiwan Strait or Palestine. In addition, the blame for the disease may take on an ethnic or racial component. In the U.S., swine flu has already encouraged latent racism against Latinos to bubble to the surface. For organizations where keeping calm is a daily struggle, like prisons, pandemic panic can lead to riots or even murders.

I’m not advocating that information about potential epidemics be hidden in order to keep the public docile. We should still warn the population at large and try to quarantine diseases before they spread, because, even though swine flu will likely turn out to be mild, our species remains highly vulnerable to rapidly communicable diseases.

In fact, we likely face a bigger threat from viruses today than ever before. For nearly all of human history, the fastest way to travel was by horseback, and contagious diseases could only spread from town to town by piggybacking on migratory animals or unlucky travelers. Despite these difficulties, the Black Death in Europe was still able to kill between 30 and 60 percent of Europe’s population. The forward march of science around the globe has helped keep disease at bay through vaccinations, good hygiene, and quarantines, but international air travel gives upstart pathogens hoping to hit the big time an advantage their ancestors never had. Should the Black Death return, it could crisscross the globe in a matter of hours.

With stakes this high, no agency, from the WHO to Harvard’s administration, wants to understate a hazard or withhold any information that could potentially save lives. And, after the intelligence failure surrounding 9/11, there is added pressure to ensure that every threat, no matter how obscure, is identified and contained.

There is some prudence in this approach. Any warning system that only responded to true emergencies would clearly be too conservative. But media messages about a potential threat must be put in context, and authorities must take pains to be specific.

For instance, a recent letter sent via email to the entire university from the provost and the director of University Health Services said there were two cases of the flu reported in Lowell, unnecessarily causing many students to worry that there was an outbreak in the undergraduate house, rather than the implied cases in Lowell, Mass. Similarly, the vice president mentioned at a news conference last week that he would advise his family to avoid going “anywhere in confined places now” like airplanes. His comments aren’t only unfairly damaging to the airline industry, but, given his position in the government, they also suggest that he has inside information about the flu’s dangers that aren’t being shared with the general public. Similarly, mainstream media outlets should resist the temptation to sensationalize coverage with terms like “vicious virus” (used by CNN).

In a true pandemic situation, the state of panic would be unavoidable and probably much more severe. But, for swine flu, we truly have nothing to fear but fear itself.


Adam R. Gold ’11, a Crimson editorial writer, is a physics concentrator in Adams House. His column appears on alternate Mondays.