One of the odd things about being a journalist is that you sometimes cover issues that directly affect you.
So on the one hand you have to try to carefully and objectively assess the news value and credibility of the information and sources you’re considering, deciding whether something is even worth doing a story about, and on the other hand you are keenly and personally connected to the issue and information.
So you stand partially outside a story and partially on the inside, which is a weird feeling. (That’s not an ethical problem if it’s a broad, general issue, rather than a specific situation.)
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I was doing that Monday when I was writing a couple of stories about the H1N1 flu and its possible impact on farmers. Before and after writing the stories I spent a couple of hours at a vaccine clinic in downtown Winnipeg getting my shot. I’m one of those people who were encouraged to go in early to get the shot because I have asthma, and this particular flu seems to be killing middle-aged people with bad lungs. I also have a two year old girl and a seven month old girl, so our household contains a bunch of risk factors. My girls got their shots Monday too, as did my wife, who’d have to look after us if we get taken down by H1N1.
Because of my own vulnerability to the disease, and my fear for my girls, I’m probably oversensitized to the risks. Or maybe I’m not and am just being informed and reasonable. It’s hard to be objective about yourself. Â But I’m much calmer and more relaxed about the situation ever since we got our shots, even though I know it’ll be another week before we’ve gotten a 90 percent chance of full immunity. (The vaccine needs about 10 days before it has provoked the body’s immune system to develop a powerful enough defence against the illness.) I’m now doing the countdown to immunity, and already 72 hours of the 240 hour period is passed. Tick, tick, tick . . .
Perhaps my fearful situation until Monday was why I was wondering and writing a story about how vulnerable the pork markets are now to a renewal of the pork-phobia that caused some domestic consumers and numerous countries to shun the meat during the original spring outbreak of H1N1 in the mistaken belief that H1N1 could be spread by pork in the grocery stores. Back in the spring China and Russia slammed their borders shut and crashed our pork market, causing immense financial pain to farmers. It killed off the anticipated and occurring pork market rally that would have saved many producers across the continent from the dire situation they’re in today.
Will consumers overreact again, or will their fear about H1N1 not cross over into pork-phobia? That was what I was writing about. Certainly public fear is intense right now, and likely to grow more extreme. The shocking death of a healthy 13 year old hockey player and a 10 year old in Ontario made a lot of people here in Winnipeg finally take H1N1 seriously. Long queues in Calgary are making Albertans furious at their government and creating a panicky feeling among some who now aren’t sure they’ll be able to get a shot even if they show up at a clinic. And headlines around the world are terrifying people about H1N1 – and world media sources aren’t afraid to use the term “Swine Flu.” Look below at this headline on the front page of a British newspaper’s Canadian edition that I found greeting me as I waited in the lineup at Safeway on Friday night.
There are no signs yet that domestic or foreign consumers or governments are connecting “swine flu” to pork. A number of pork market analysts I have spoken to say they don’t think consumers will be likely to see pork as a likely source of H1N1. There’s more of a chance that foreign governments will use the revival of H1N1 during this flu season to play market access games, analysts say. But they can always find an excuse to close the door, so that’s less of a worry than the killing of underlying consumer demand, which seemed to be a risk last spring.
Fortunately, the diligent work of public health authorities, the hog industry and the mainstream media has seemed to make the average consumer out there free from worry about the safety of pork. They seem to have been inoculated against misunderstanding of the connection of “swine flu” in people and the eating of pork, so at least one vaccine out there works.
And yes, I did say the mainstream media was one of the causes of this relatively unworried-about-pork consumer, even though I know lots of folks in agriculture and the hog industry are outraged every time they hear the term “swine flu” on the radio or see it in print in a newspaper headline. Regardless of the offending term, Â I have heard reporters repeatedly say in “swine flu” stories that pork is not transmitting the disease, and after 200 repetitions of that information, most consumers seem to have accepted it. The mainstream media may have generally kept calling H1N1 “swine flu,” and that’s its right, because it’s not an outright inaccuracy. But most did an excellent job of pointing out that pork and the disease are not cause and effect and that’s a lot more than they had to do.
It’s too early to say whether this will stick. Anxiety shot high in Canada because of the Ontario deaths, the deaths of young mothers in the U.K. are rattling people there and North Dakotans are panicky over vaccine shortages, but these are the early stages of the flu season. There are weeks to go when infection rates could skyrocket, and whether the public’s ability to keep “swine flu” and pork in different mental boxes hasn’t yet been put to a severe test. That test will come if infections increase, more unexpected people die, and people find they can’t get themselves or their children vaccinated because there aren’t enough doses available or because government authorities have bungled the implementation.
But if enough people get vaccinated before the disease really gets going, fewer die than now feared and vaccines are available easily to the worried, this dark cloud hanging over society will fade. And a knife at the throat of pork producers will be removed.
I can state one relevant thing from personal experience: I felt a lot better after I got my shot and my girls got theirs. I’m still anxious while the countdown to immunity continues inside our bodies. We’re not going to my daughter’s swimming and gymnastics classes this week, nor our church bazaar on Saturday, because we’re still semi-at risk for the H1N1. But come next Wednesday night, we’ll re-engage in society. And I expect all our fears will fade.
So that’s probably how public paranoia and fear will fade: one by one, people will get vaccinated, and one by one hundreds of millions of people will stop worrying.
