What swine flu tells us about global cooperation

Libertarian neo-isolationists and neoconservative institution-bashers should take note.

One almost gets the sense that post topics here are chosen based on the criterion of what will serve as the best frame on which to hang attacks on those Walt disagrees with.

Was that last sentence really necessary, and is it anything other than a strawman? The WHO is one of the least politicized bodies in the UN, and I have read some seasoned UN bashers acknowledge this and the good work it does. Perhaps Walt or someone can provide an instance where a neocon "bashes" the WHO as a body? I don't necessarily doubt it happens, I have just never seen it.

I think about Israel/Palestine as an example.

The same questions about public health, very close ecological problems (toxic water table) cross boundaries and touch human responses more than partisan.

They do create bonds between individuals within different cultures, and can moreso.

It gets confused when ambulances or hospitals are used for any element of military or propaganda purpose.

I agree with the first commenter. It would have been good if Prof. Walt had identified who are these libertarian neo-isolationists who disagree with his proposition that "global cooperation is possible, and that some global institutions do provide valuable protection."

I'm a libertarian and could probably be categorized as a neo-isolationist in terms of the use of force, at least, and I don't know one person who disagrees with Walt's remark. Maybe they're out there, but I don't know who they are.

100M box of anti-viirus makes $5B. Poor Madicine-men are out of business;->>

Still it is cheaper than the anti-virus software I am using and I wouldn't even die if I don't use it;->>

She said "the whole humanity is unser threat!", she must know something that we don't know, or maybe she is hypocrite;->

I am sure the genetic engineering technology is capable to design the virus to attack a specific family of genes, why would we worried about WMDs with big-blasts;->

Like the software technology is capable to design a software virus/anti-virus to target a specific software exposed to Internet.

BTW, it is time to re-read La Peste (1947; The Plague, 1948) by Camus A. It gives quite a realistic picture about how the State administers such a case;->>

Grand Sen~or.

I think one of the main reasons we are seeing cooperation is because of domestic audience costs.

There is an incentive to free-ride here, and let the richer states pay the cost of dealing with the virus. But no leader knows if his/her citizens will be affected. If he/she does nothing, and citizens get sick, then there will be hell to pay domestically. But if the leader is seen doing something, and citizens get sick, then the population (voters, usually) won't punish the leader because it wouldn't appear to be his/her fault.

So since the spread of the virus is unpredictable, the benefits of free riding do not outweigh the costs of inaction. So everybody plays nice.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/apr/29/swine-flu-mexico-uk-media1

Swine flu? A panic stoked in order to posture and spend

o The Guardian, Wednesday 29 April 2009

We have gone demented. Two Britons are or were (not very) ill from flu. "This could really explode," intones a reporter for BBC News. "London warned: it's here," cries the Evening Standard. Fear is said to be spreading "like a Mexican wave". It "could affect" three-quarters of a million Britons. It "could cost" three trillion dollars. The "danger", according to the radio, is that workers who are not ill will be "worried" (perhaps by the reporter) and fail to turn up at power stations and hospitals.

Appropriately panicked, on Monday ministers plunged into their Cobra bunker beneath Whitehall to prepare for the worst. Had Tony Blair been about they would have worn germ warfare suits. British government is barking mad.

What is swine flu? It is flu, a mutation of the H1N1 virus of the sort that often occurs. It is not a pandemic, despite the media prefix, not yet. The BBC calls it a "potentially terrible virus", but any viral infection is potentially terrible. Flu makes you feel ill. You should take medicine and rest. You will then get well again, unless you are very unlucky or have some complicating condition. It is best to avoid close contact with other people, as applies to a common cold.

In Mexico, 2,000 people have been diagnosed as suffering swine flu. Some 150 of them have died, though there is said to be no pathological indication of all these deaths being linked to the new flu strain. People die all the time after catching flu, especially if not medicated.

Nobody anywhere else in the world has died from this infection and only a handful have the new strain confirmed, most in America and almost all after returning from Mexico. A couple from Airdrie who caught the flu on holiday in Cancun are getting better. That tends to happen to people who get flu, however much it may disappoint editors.

We appear to have lost all ability to judge risk. The cause may lie in the national curriculum, the decline of "news" or the rise of blogs and concomitant, unmediated hysteria, but people seem helpless in navigating the gulf that separates public information from their daily round. They cannot set a statistic in context. They cannot relate bad news from Mexico to the risk that inevitably surrounds their lives. The risk of catching swine flu must be millions to one.

Health scares are like terrorist ones. Someone somewhere has an interest in it. We depend on others with specialist knowledge to advise and warn us and assume they offer advice on a dispassionate basis, using their expertise to assess danger and communicating it in measured English. Words such as possibly, potentially, could or might should be avoided. They are unspecific qualifiers and open to exaggeration.

The World Health Organisation, always eager to push itself into the spotlight, loves to talk of the world being "ready" for a flu pandemic, apparently on the grounds that none has occurred for some time. There is no obvious justification for this scaremongering. I suppose the world is "ready" for another atomic explosion or another 9/11.

Professional expertise is now overwhelmed by professional log-rolling. Risk aversion has trounced risk judgment. An obligation on public officials not to scare people or lead them to needless expense is overridden by the yearning for a higher budget or more profit. Health scares enable media-hungry doctors, public health officials and drugs companies to benefit by manipulating fright.

On Monday the EU health commissioner, Androulla Vassiliou, advised travellers not to go to north or central America "unless it's very urgent". The British Foreign Office warned against "all but essential" travel to Mexico because of the danger of catching flu. This was outrageous. It would make more sense to proffer such a warning against the American crime rate. Yet such health-and-safety hysteria wiped millions from travel company shares.

During the BSE scare of 1995-7, grown men with medical degrees predicted doom, terrifying ministers into mad politician disease. The scientists' hysteria, that BSE "has the potential to infect up to 10 million Britons", led to tens of thousands of cattle being fed into power stations and £5bn spent on farmers' compensation. A year later, the scientists tried to maintain that BSE "might" spread to sheep because, according to one government scientist, "the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence". The meat industry was wrecked and an absurd ongoing cost was imposed on stock farmers with the closure and concentration of abattoirs.

This science-based insanity was repeated during the Sars outbreak of 2003, asserted by Dr Patrick Dixon, formerly of the London Business School, to have "a 25% chance of killing tens of millions". The press duly headlined a plague "worse than Aids". Not one Briton died.

The same lunacy occurred in 2006 with avian flu, erupting after a scientist named John Oxford declared that "it will be the first pandemic of the 21st century". The WHO issued a statement that "one in four Britons could die".

Epidemiologists love the word "could" because it can always assure them of a headline. During the avian flu mania, Canada geese were treated like Goering's bombers. RSPB workers were issued with protective headgear.The media went berserk, with interviewers asking why the government did not close all schools "to prevent up to 50,000 deaths". The Today programme's John Humphrys became frantic when a dead goose flopped down on an isolated Scottish beach and a hapless local official refused to confirm the BBC's hysteria. The bird might pose no threat to Scotland, but how dare he deny London journalists a good panic?

Meanwhile a real pestilence, MRSA and C difficile, was taking hold in hospitals. It was suppressed by the medical profession because it appeared that they themselves might be to blame. These diseases have played a role in thousands of deaths in British hospitals - the former a reported 1,652 and the latter 8,324 in 2007 alone. Like deaths from alcoholism, we have come to regard hospital-induced infection as an accident of life, a hazard to which we have subconsciously adjusted.

MRSA and C difficile are not like swine flu, an opportunity for public figures to scare and posture and spend money. They are diseases for which the government is to blame. They claim no headlines and no Cobra priority. Their sufferers must crawl away and die in silence.

simon.jenkins@guardian.co.uk

The only reason the swine flu is front page news this week is because all the evidence is coming out that not only were Guantanamo detainees tortured needlessly (after they already told the US everything they knew), but their entire incarceration is based on false hysterical testimony cooked up by neocons in the administration like Mathew Levitt.

SECRET Defense Ministry database on illegal construction in the territories" translated in the document linked to below.

"An analysis of the data reveals that, in the vast majority of the settlements - about 75 percent - construction, sometimes on a large scale, has been carried out without the appropriate permits or contrary to the permits that were issued," according to the Haaretz account. "The database also shows that, in more than 30 settlements, extensive construction of buildings and infrastructure (roads, schools, synagogues, yeshivas and even police stations) has been carried out on private lands belonging to Palestinian West Bank residents."

Here is the full document:

http://www.fas.org/irp/world/israel/database-e.pdf

When someone alleges a global media coverup to protect Israel, the Armenians aren't usually the first group to come to mind. Neither are the Tibetans or the Chileans. The fact that the alarmism is global logically precludes "the Lobby", whose alleged influence only encompasses America, but I did give you the benefit of the doubt in my previous post.

If you let me know the code word du jour you guys are using for "Jew", I'll try to remember to use it next time. I think one regular poster uses "zionist", and wants to limit "zionists" from working certain jobs and automatically assumes they are traitors.

Swine Flu taught me that it is stupid to assume a flu-virus with a certain genetic structure will and can operate the same way on all humanity which has so many variety of genetic structures to produce the same result - death. Therefore, it was not wise to claim that "all humanity is under threat" by WHO. Now, I have all the right reasons to suspect that WHO released such a statement for business/other reasons rather than medical reasons.
I can't assume that WHO experts are that ignorant.
WHO has to pay for this.

Grand Sen~or.

Or does SARS matter only [within] the margins?