Loading ...- Category:
- Soap Box
- Author:
- Phil Scott
- Posted:
- Tuesday, 5 May 2009
A new enemy has been identified. Snuffling up to join Asian Birds and Mad Cows are today’s trendsetters, Rotten Swine.
Bill Bowtell, one of the main architects of Australia’s swift response to the AIDS crisis, wrote about pandemics last week. He argued that when the going was good, governments such as our own should have spent more in aid to the Third World to set up better health systems Â-” an investment in case a deadly virus sprang up in a country that couldn’t control it. Obviously we didn’t.
So did we spend the money on our own health system? Apparently, though experience says it wasn’t enough. Maybe we could put one or all of those billion-dollar submarines and fighter-bomber planes on hold -” until, say, hell freezes over -” and redirect the defence handouts to health. It’s either that or bomb the shit out of Mexico and hope for the best.
As security personnel snapped into action at the airport, testing anyone they suspected of bringing home the bacon, some of our more foolhardy politicians found themselves in Mexico itself. Among them were Belinda Neal (studying iguanas) and the well-documented homophobe Senator Bill Heffernan.
Because of the flu risk, Heffernan refused to travel into Mexico City. Good thinking, Senator, stay in the countryside. No pigs there.
A month ago, Bill was stopped by security at Parliament House in Sydney and forced to surrender a knife he was carrying on his person. He told the officers, Fuck it, you can have it. Clearly, the man was already rabid. The knife remains under observation and if traces of pork DNA show up, the Senator could spend the rest of his parliamentary term in quarantine.
How seriously should we take this epidemic? At the time of writing, the World Health Organisation would confirm only seven deaths, all Mexican. Some people in the US who tested positive for the virus are even getting better.
How dare they! Doesn’t the WHO read the papers? Didn’t they pick up the Telegraph last week with its explanatory photo of pigs on the front page (to help readers who didn’t know what swine meant)? Can’t we panic? Sydney hasn’t had a good pandemic for 90 years! I want to start painting little pink curly tails on the houses of flu victims.
Sure, some people shrug it off. My friend Drew Fairley thinks researchers will develop an oinkment. I’m more concerned, because I know a few sex-pigs who may be at risk. Not to mention Trough Man. How can you tell if you have swine flu? It starts with a sort of crackling in the chest.
Viruses love crowds, and the NSW State Government is concerned about it spreading on trains. To prevent this, they have implemented an emergency timetable to ensure all trains are running really late or are cancelled altogether. Ahead of the game for once, they switched to it in 2001.
Tags: AIDS, Belinda Neal, Bill Bowtell, Bill Heffernan, epidemics, Swine Flu, WHO
May 18th, 2009 @ 9:28 pm
I am hoping that you may be able to explain some issues to me. Firstly, I appreciate that you’re a journalist not a doctor,virologist or epidemiologist. Secondly, I know that you’re just an individual gay man & not an apologist for the entire GLBT community. But you are a member of the SSO team, probably the most prominent GLBT media outlet in the country, meaning that you & you’re colleagues are de facto spokespeople for the GLBT community, whether or not you sought or relish the role.
So my query is as follows. With regard to the emergence of each new potential doomsday disease. SARS, bird flu, swine flu, Ebola in Africa in mid90s & inevitably more to come in the future. In all of these cases the worst case scenario of tens or hundreds of millions of deaths has not occured, seemingly for one fundamental reason. The joint efforts of governments & the media created a widespread but legitimate fear which seems in large part to have proved successful on each occasion towards containment. The primary factor attributable to this being the widespread self imposed travel boycotts that occur during these outbreaks, which can greatly assist containment. Essentially imploring the masses towards an avoidence of risk behaviour. Generally the imposition of fear on people is rightly demonized, however occassions like these demonstrate that sometimes it has value.
This leads me to my key question. Why doesn’t this strategy(avoidence of risk behaviour & having a healthy level of fear)seem to be stemming the rate of HIV infections among gay men in the developed world. HIV/AIDS has been with humanity for close to 30 yrs now & the amount of money & resources devoted to education & awareness must greatly surpass that for all the aforementioned epidemics combined. So boiling all this down to a single question, What Gives?
May 29th, 2009 @ 9:43 am
That’s a very good question but I’m not in a position to write about it. I may do some proper research and write up a column some time.
But my uninformed gut feeling is that other influences cloud the issue when it comes to HIV, and also that people’s sex drive gets in the way of good sense. Avoiding contact with swine flu doesn’t require you to give up something you feel compelled to do. Avoiding HIV requires you to at least moderate the kind of sexual contact you can have. Sex is a unique area of human activity, and it is loaded with a lot of attiutude whereas other simple functions like eating and breathing are not. So while the strategies and the fear are there, other complex issues work against them.