Posted 5/5/2009

THE SWINE FLU PANDEMIC HYSTERIA

by guest columnist Swinean P. Hogg

There is a great deal of surprise and panic going about this new flu, which you humans have labeled "swine flu."

Panic, perhaps. But surprise? Ridiculous.

No one should have been caught napping about the fact that a superior porcine population could create a new flu. If the inferior world of birds could create a scary "avian flu," why on earth would the World Health Organization be surprised that we vastly superior pigs could create our own brand of flu?

If a bunch of dumb birds could incubate viral strains from birds and humans to create a new form of flu, why did you fail to anticipate what we could do?

Our motto is: "What a bird can do, a pig can do better."

Now, I admit that the porcine world was severely embarrassed by the fact that the bird world got ahead of us on this flu business. We brooded about the fact that we were suffering a huge "flu gap." It was similar to you Americans brooding about the "missile gap" with the Soviets a few decades ago.

So we set our minds on doing the birds one or two better.

We incubated viral strains from humans, pigs and birds, creating a whole new over-the-top flu which bypasses all the flimsy anti-viral created by humans. Tamiflu has some effect, but it's incapable of stopping our new flu (which we have dubbed "Man Flu"). Besides, the slow-moving American Bush Administration only produced enough to cover ten percent of your population. That's why you had to call out the National Guard to guard the stuff, weak as it is.

Can you imagine the riots, black marketing and price-gouging that would take place if we were really serious about our new Man Flu?

Fortunately for you, our first attempt was limited in effect by our basic porcine decency.

We could have made it much worse. For example, there is a report out of Canada that shows how agile our new Man Flu virus is. Not only has it leaped from pigs to humans, but in Canada there's a case where a pig farmer caught the Man Flu from a neighbor human and then infected his 200 pigs. And when viruses bounce around between species, they get stronger and deadlier. Just look at AIDS, which bounced around between simians and humans.

We porkpies also demonstrated that our marketing skills are superior to those of birds. Our feathered rivals generated Avian Flu in China, where the government covers up anything bad that happens.

We decided to avoid introducing our new Man Flu in China for two reasons:

First, government secrecy, of course. (Beijing believes that if a panda does it in a bamboo forest and nobody knows about it, that it really didn't happen at all.)

Second, the Chinese worship pigs. The "Year of the Pig" is considered very fortuitous for engaging in new activities. In Years of the Pig, marriage rates soar, far more babies are born and an extraordinary number of new businesses are launched.

The year 2007 was the "Year of the Golden Pig," which comes every 60 or 600 years, depending on your astrologer. The "Year of the Golden Pig" is a super-good-luck year. The government was so afraid of the golden pig that all media coverage and advertising showing a pig was banned. Our Chinese porcine brethren were really pissed. But Beijing was terrified that their beloved "one child" policy could be destroyed with a billion humans getting sexually stimulated all at once by a bounty of golden pig symbols.

What this means is that the nervous Chinese government didn't dare blame a killing flu on something as venerated as a pig. If we had launched our Man Flu in Shanghai, the world would still not have heard of it.

So we picked Mexico. The government can't control anything there. We knew that as soon as the first cases hit, our authorship of a new flu would be out for everyone to see and hear about. We would be able to show up the birds on day one of our launch.

Now, I hope you understand that we pigs did the human world a wonderful service. By creating a new Man Flu which wasn't very potent, we served up a big warning about the next pandemic to come. As more and more viruses travel between more and more species, they will become increasingly complex and ever more lethal. (Most humans don't understand geometry, but the growth rate of new pandemic threats will be more geometric than arithmetic in nature.)

So we gave you the warning.

Take heed.

It's up to you to get with it.

- Start developing and producing new flu vaccines and treatments. Stop making war and start making human health.

- Hesitate too long, and you may prove your Bible to have been wrong. It may be we pigs who achieve dominion over the earth.

(Swinean P. Hogg is a distinguished researcher and lecturer at The Brookings Farms Institution.)

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