False alarm : the truth about the epidemic of fear by Siegel Marc

Author:Siegel, Marc
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fear, Epidemics, Security (Psychology), Social control
Publisher: Hoboken, N.J. : John Wiley & Sons
Published: 2005-12-14T16:00:00+00:00

FALSE ALARM

lead stated, "The number of cases of West Nile fever is expected to rise sharply in the next week. ... If the current epidemic reflects experience, about 10 percent of the cases will be fatal."

Altman's and others' emphasis on fatalities helped provoke fear. West Nile did kill, but it was still a very rare disease. By this time, half the country was scratching and overheating in fall clothing. People were afraid to go into their backyards, expecting to encounter either a dead bird or a killer mosquito. Dr. Lyle Peterson, an epidemiologist at the CDC who is an expert in insect-borne diseases, helped spread the panic by speculating that most patients were hospitalized due to brain swelling, when in fact most people afflicted suffered a mild flu or no symptoms at all.

Anthrax narrowed the focus of our fear. After 9/11 we felt vulnerable to attack, and after anthrax we felt vulnerable to infectious agents. West Nile virus was the first bug du jour after anthrax, and the American public quickly transferred its unrealistic fear of the mail to a fear of mosquitoes. Each time we gave fear a name, there was a hope we could control the threat and thereby control the fear. But with each media-driven infection, our fear was soon well out of proportion to the actual risk. We had seen bird viruses of the same class (arboviruses) transmitted from the east to the west by mosquitoes before, yet we had never responded with the trepidation we felt for West Nile virus. These were viruses with a risk of sickness and death, but so were the other arboviruses that didn't scare us nearly as much as West Nile did.

There were cases of West Nile virus in 1999, 2000, and 2001, but it wasn't until after anthrax drew our attention to bacteria and viruses in 2002 that we began to worry about West Nile virus. The number of cases was on the rise, but hardly enough to justify the sudden hysteria.

What Is West Nile Virus?

West Nile virus is transmitted among wild birds by the Culex pip-iens mosquito, otherwise known as the southern house mosquito.

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