Hindustan Times
Covering a flu
It’s easy to ask people not to panic. Please don’t panic, if swine flu doesn’t get you, the next truck will. But it wasn’t easy for us to take that stand, not with the whole world going crazy.
How do you tell parents not to panic when their children’s school shuts down after a child was reported down with swine flu? It’s no longer a scare, but a fact. And it’s not happening in another country, or city. The channels hit the panic button the day Rida Shaikh died in Pune. They have been in overdrive since. The newspapers were a little careful going down that road, or conservative perhaps.
And the biggest question: how do you ask others not to panic when you can feel it yourself? Anytime anyone near me sneezed or coughed, I turned away my face, stupidly perhaps, to escape the shotgun burst of droplets. But we took a stand, largely driven by one of the senior editors. We opened our offensive with a list of those killed till then by swine flu and with the diagnosis by the doctors.
In five of the eights cases listed, we found, that H1N1 was only an accomplice, the killer diseases were hypertension, diabetes, asthma or kidney problem.
The picture was quite clear. And so was the way forward: while there was no denying that people were dying of swine flu or complications caused by, there was no reason to panic. And that is essential.
I don’t know how many of you will recall the plague outbreak of 1994. I was then a reporter with The Times of India, and was assigned to cover the plague as all other reporters in the team.
That was the biggest story of the day. All newspapers – there were no news channels back then, with the exception of Doordarshan, which didn’t seem to care much for such stories – put everyone they could on the plague story.
I was assigned the Infectious Diseases Hospital, which was Ground Zero for Delhi. Most plague cases – suspected or otherwise – landed up there. It was a place where you could catch any and every infectious disease.
But it was an assignment, and I had to be there every day. My Yezdi – a phenomenally untrustworthy motorcycle — never once gave me the excuse to stay home. It reached me there every day, unfailingly.
We had the same concerns then. I used to keep a strip of a drug said to cure plague in the back of my jeans and a surgical mask – they were nothing like the N 95s available now, and cost only Rs 30.
Returning home after work was like driving through a ghost town – not a soul in sight. It was very eerie – only time in my life when I missed the noisy, chaotic Delhi traffic.
And then, it disappeared, just as suddenly as it had appeared. Life returned to the usual office-work-office cycle, and, gradually, plague faded out becoming only a memory.
But plague was no flu like the swine flu. Doctors and epidemiologists are now saying this is just one more flu in town, get used to it. It will harass and trouble you just like the others, the common flu.
It will be a while before sanity returns. Till then, we need to fight this together, both the disease and the panic.
I would like to hear your views on this…
(3 votes, average: 4.33 out of 5)
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life and work goes on . not because there were any special measures taken or commitments given by the managemeent to the worker bees .. but the commitment of the worker bees themselves to their work and to their customers … I am sure it will be the same story in all the IT companies .. rest assured folks ..we will not let down our customers; our industry and in effect our country ..
D10 Reply:
August 14th, 2009 at 11:52 am
I am firmly of the opinion that the media is very largely responsible for the panic around swine flu. Awareness does not require 24/7 obsessive coverage. I think it has been weeks since I have switched to a news channel and seen any other news. I once spotted Baba Ramdev (at least a change I thought!) on some channel, except he was on because he was talking about swine flu! East Asia was hit by a deadly typhoon last week and the coverage of that disaster has been reduced to 2 minute bits at the end of a news telecast and small columns in the papers, simply because no one dared to take swine flu off the breaking news radar!
I agree that the media plays a very important role in spreading awareness which is especially important at a time when something so contagious is around us. However, I feel that this can be done in a calm fashion as well. Each and every news channel without exception seems to have lost all sense of proportion in this bid to create awareness. Callers are phoning in to ask whether they should take Tamiflu if they find themselves sniffing. Why has the media become the repository of all information? Why are people feeling the need to call up a news channel for a medical query? There is something inherently wrong in that! Information bulletins and advertisements are fine. Even one hour specials with doctors are fine. But if those one hour specials are followed by debates on schools being closed and another news bulletin on another death and another call-in doctor, then I’d say it’s clear where the panic comes from!
And HT too has been in the same mould I’m sorry to say. A headline in gigantic letters calling upon people to ‘STOP THE PANIC’ does precious little! Shifting swine flu related news a few inches down or a few inches to the right might serve the purpose a hundred times better! Or perhaps the purpose is not to stop the panic, but merely to have an eye-grabbing headline!
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yashwant raj Reply:
August 14th, 2009 at 1:06 pm
you are judging us wrongly — the intention really is to stop the panic — that’s why the lead story with a bold headline — and if you read the story it explains why we must stop this panic — it was the biggest story of the day — the flu and the panic around it — we can’t underplay it — we must address the issues, and head on
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