Swine flu and public space
Above: Flickr user Chupacabras is posting photos of Mexico City museums closed due to swine flu.
By coincidence, I have a student in Mexico right now who has to live in quarantine due to the scare, and I've spent the better part of the past week waylaid by some #$!?! bug that's going around up here.*
This got me thinking about the organizational structures of illness in times past, a question that fascinated me as a tyke thanks to educational childrens books my grandparents had kept from the 1940s. In those books quarantine was a social norm--I still remember illustrations of houses in quarantine and other areas that savvy kids should avoid. These books also put me on the lookout for old quarantine signs at flea markets, a cool relic of lost time.
That Mexico has so readily issued quarantine notices and closures while the U.S. has, for all the scare talk, relatively held back speaks to a seismic cultural shift in the years since the polio, mumps and measles vaccines have become standard. Worth noting in this context is the interplay of quarantine with discrimination, a factor in the response to AIDS and what some outside the U.S. are calling the Mexican flu. Equally relevant: our shifting scale of what constitutes a noteworthy pandemic--compared to the last great Western flu epidemic, this is barely a blip.
At what point the norm would switch back to that of the 1940s is unclear. If we scale up from 1 death to 100? 1,000? More? And at what point is there an ethical obligation to avoid public interaction or to shut down your real-world social medium?
Worthwhile questions to consider, but not now--gotta take my Benedryl.
*I'm not joining in the NYC swine flu hysteria, obvs, which at times has been rather amusing in the way every sniffle can be taken to be fatal. Soooo, not wanting to join in the mass panic & out of a misguided sense of duty last night I dragged myself to class, where my students aptly teased me for consigning them to their deaths. As they pointed out, while their imminent demise could be seen as a bad thing, at least it would give them a valid excuse for not completing their final projects.
The other interesting thing about this bug, at least for me, is that it has been wreaking havoc with my memory & communication. I'm normally weak with names--I tend to recall personality markers, not labels--but this past week has been an absolute nominal jumble. I'll look at people I know and address them by names of people not there, and I'll write words with no relation to what I'm speaking or thinking. A real Oliver Saks experience.
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Personally I think that the easiest way to catch swine flu is to be in the public places. That's why I try to avoid it and do not go there. If I have to go somewhere I always use swine flu mask because this flu is really dangerous and can cause even the death! We could not it compare, for example, with stomach virus which is treated with some medications. I think that all people should know the basic information about this dangerous flu so that is why I always follow all information about it. Thanks a lot for the useful entry and I will be waiting for more news about this flu.
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