Scares in the Past that have Blown Over

[Kev Williams]

I'm old enough to remember the Cuban Missile Crisis-- actually I knew nothing about Cubans or missiles, but I still remember weeks of movies about bombs, fallout, fallout shelters, learning the Civil Defense logo, eating dried foods, washing the dust off outside food if you survived and ventured outside...

And what about the SARS(?) virus, is that still going?

And Y2K... The last thing I could take seriously, were those people trying to convince me that my computer, which could do millions of complex math calculations per second, somehow didn't know how to count to 2000...

[Phil Thien]

The demise of Hostess would mean no more Twinkies. They're back. I actually monitor the box of them at the gas station, it is still full, so looks like we don't really need them.

[Moses Yoder]

I don't really see any sense in fearing death. We are all going to die at some point. I really never expected to live this long.

[Phil Thien]

I don't really see any sense in fearing death. We are all going to die at some point. I really never expected to live this long.

I don't mind dying, I just don't want to be liquefied.

[John Goodin]

My mother in law had her kids hang out inside when the Skylab was crashing back to Earth in the late 70s. She was prepared in case it happened to crash in suburban San Antonio. Just another example of people thinking the world is no bigger than realm which they occupy.

[Shawn Pixley]

David,

Certainly some of this is overblown. But you don't need to go back many years when H1N1 virus killed 50 to 100 million people during the 1917 - 1919 influenza pandemic - many brought it back from the war to the US. The first case in the US was in Kansas of all places. In some cases entire communities were killed. Measles and other diseases killed incredible numbers of people. The plague killed millions on multiple occasions.

Public health depends upon two avenues to mitigate this - vaccination and isolation. As there is no vaccine, isolating the sick from the healthy is really the only course of action. Unfortunately, to isolate people it needs to be broadly communicated. Hence the over hype.

However, if you were in Hong Kong when the avian flu was running around, you wouldn't consider it over hyped there. If a highly communicable disease were to start in the US, the first level of containment is via isolation. This is what worked during the plague. We have been lucky so far. The yellow fever epidemics of the nineteenth century in the US are a main reason we developed such a strong public health system. An abundance of precaution is necessary to see it doesn't happen again. Sometime we see this as hype.

[David Weaver]

Right, like I said, I don't include old epidemics like the spanish flu. Plague, polio, you name it.

More the recent things that were overblown - the swine flu, the BSE, the bird flu.

[Jim Matthews]

For example, climate change was deliberately introduced in a way that was intended to alarm people, complete with dire predictions. Now, it is hard to know what is real and what isn't.

If Vancouver Island got any wetter, would anyone notice?

[Jim Matthews]

I am by no means a “prepper”, but don’t we all prep a little using common sense like washing hands, cleaning our food, or other hygienic measures.

It is also amazing how many things we just take for granted any more when it comes to Pandemics, disease, etc. We just shrug off the fact that 36,000 people die every year from the flu in the United States without panicking. How about the 8.2 million worldwide cancer deaths every year? 1.5 million people died of HIV in 2012? I am sure there were those in 1918 that said there is really nothing to worry about with the flu pandemic. Then it killed 3%-5% of the world’s population. We tend to shrug things off until we can’t shrug them off and then in some cases the only thing left to do is......

It's important to note three things:

Epidemics like these tend to develop in Tropical areas, where humans have little in the way of modern sanitation.

They are spread by people with risky behavior (sex tourists, the unfortunate patient in Texas that lied about recent contact with an Ebola victim)
who are less than forthcoming about their habits, at the expense of the public at large. Air travel is the likely destabilizing factor in transmission.

Cancer isn't communicable like infectious diseases.


We're afraid of things that we can't see, that are "done" to us.

This epidemic is a clear illustration of how the most important interpersonal network;
plumbing, makes so much of modern civilization pleasant, tolerable and convenient.

To those battening down the hatch on their silos I say this;
live somewhere without clean tap water to get a grip.

[Pat Barry]

that just about says it all.

[Jim Matthews]

We might be the last two.

Reading the newspaper, I mean.
TV News is just following the model set by Walter Winchell.

I'm surprised every generation falls for the same tricks.

I don't envy you, living with your folks again.

[ray hampton]

We might be the last two.

Reading the newspaper, I mean.
TV News is just following the model set by Walter Winchell.

I'm surprised every generation falls for the same tricks.

I don't envy you, living with your folks again.

I bought a sunday paper last month [the first after a long wait[ the paper was 1/4 the size of the older paper but it cost more

[Shawn Pixley]

Right, like I said, I don't include old epidemics like the spanish flu. Plague, polio, you name it.

More the recent things that were overblown - the swine flu, the BSE, the bird flu.

David, I don't think that you appreciate how much effect that the hype has in changing behavior and stopping the spread of disease. All these things are killers today.

The World Health Organization estimates that in 2012, there were 207 million cases of malaria. That year, the disease is estimated to have killed between 473,000 and 789,000 people.

For a virus vector all it would take is a small mutation and the close proximity of people would present a real threat to us. It is the "hype" that changes behavior and stops the spread of these diseases. I am sorry you feel this is an imposition.

[Bill Edwards(2)]

A massive swarm of bees attacked landscapers in Arizona Wednesday, killing one person. An injured victim was believed to have been stung more than 100 times.

Only one died.

[David Weaver]

For a virus vector all it would take is a small mutation and the close proximity of people would present a real threat to us. It is the "hype" that changes behavior and stops the spread of these diseases. I am sorry you feel this is an imposition.

The last high news flu scare that didn't have much of an effect other than on expectant mothers didn't really come with a change in behavior. Ebola at this point has come with almost no change in behavior here, but I'd imagine that there are a lot more people acting irrationally about it.

The killer bee scare that made for some scary movies (I remember one where supposedly people had to go into a stadium, sit in a sealed car, and wait for the stadium to cool to fridge temperature to immobilize bees, etc).

BSE involved no change in behavior, at least not one that had any significant effect, but a lot of people stopped buying beef, including safe beef. The news may have gotten USDA practices changed, but how many people contracted mad cow disease in the first place?

My point is that many of these stories affect few people, and have the potential to affect only a few even without a behavior change, but many people have irrational fears about them despite the fact that they are doing nothing about allaying the fears, because there's nothing they can do to change a near zero chance of ever being impacted.

Malaria wouldn't be counted in the things that people act irrationally about because 1) you almost never hear about it despite the fact that it actually kills hundreds of thousands of people, and 2) it legitimately affects a lot of people

Ask someone in the US if they are more afraid of ebola or malaria, and what will they say? They're probably more afraid of ebola (or even spiders or bees), and yet have no issue with driving a car around late at night, or really any time, where the potential for harm is much greater.

I'm sure ebola is really selling ad space right now on ifs and buts, ("if it changes..."). There are thousands of things people could fear "if they changed".