Ian York at Mystery Rays from Outer Space writes about Forgotten pandemics. Excerpt:
I’ve been going to some influenza-related conferences in the past week, including the International Conference on Emerging Infectious Diseases in Atlanta. One of the topics that’s come up several times is the public awareness of the 2009 pandemic H1N1 — there’s a general sense that the general public has lost interest in, or even is actively contemptuous of, the influenza pandemic. This is causing a lot of frustration, and some bafflement, among the fairly specialized audience here.
He goes on to trace a parallel with the 1918-19 pandemic. I’ve been pondering this for a long time. My grandparents were young adults at the time, and my parents were babies. Millions of people like them got very sick, and many died. But I can’t recall my grandparents ever mentioning Spanish flu except perhaps in passing. They certainly didn’t reminisce about their own experiences in the pandemic.
For that matter, I was very much alive in 1957 and 1968, but only dimly aware of those pandemics, and I didn’t think about them much until I started this blog in 2005.
Maybe one unrecognized side effect of influenza is amnesia. But what’s the word for a false memory? Because a lot of us are emerging from the H1N1 pandemic with a mistaken memory of swine flu as “no big thing.” If that’s what we recall when the next pandemic comes along, and the public just shrugs it off, the political response will be slow. And so will the medical response.
