Write a discourse about the pandemic.
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Discourses of a pandemic
In this case study Donald Matheson explores the coverage of the ‘swine flu pandemic’ of 2009 and how the construction of news stories was influenced by both perceptions of the predicted consequences of a serious flu-like pandemic and the conventions of media reporting of medical issues. However, as Matheson points out, it was also framed by institutional issues within the scientific and medical communities: “This was a discursive as much as a medical event.”
(This case study is also useful in working on Chapter 12 News and its futures)
Donald Matheson is a senior lecturer in media and communication at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. He has written two books, Media Discourses (Open University Press 2005) and Digital War Reporting (with Prof Stuart Allan, Polity Press 2009) and co-edits Ethical Space: The International Journal of Communication Ethics. Before moving to New Zealand, he taught at Strathclyde University and Cardiff University, and before that worked for a short time as an education reporter in Wellington, New Zealand.
The power of discourse to shape how people think was readily apparent in March 2009 when swine flu broke out in Mexico. In terms of death and illness, it was a relatively mild flu, certainly after the initial outbreak. By early July the World Health Organisation (WHO) had recorded 1150 deaths worldwide, out of an estimated 180,000 cases of infection, a low number particularly given the quarter to half million who die from other strains of flu in a typical year.
But in terms of people’s understanding, swine flu, or H1N1, had an enormous impact. Governments screened passengers at airports, closed schools, banned public gatherings, launched huge public education campaigns, with the Egyptian government even slaughtering its pig population. Through the enormous amount of official attention, media coverage and everyday discussion, it was perceived, interpreted, imagined by people in the medical world, in public life and in people’s personal lives as a grave risk to health. This was a discursive as much as a medical event.Epidemiologists, for example, saw what they had been fearing for many years. The most recent strain of bird flu led to various outbreaks in south-east Asia between 2004 and 2008 that killed more than two thirds of those reported as infected, although the numbers of deaths were very low. ‘The world is teetering on the edge of a pandemic that could kill a large fraction of the human population,’ one virologist, Robert Webster, titled an article in the American Scientist online (Robert G. Webster and Elizabeth Jane Walker 2003). He suggested that only the actions of vigilant scientists in convincing Hong Kong authorities to slaughter over a million domestic fowl in 1997 saved the human world from the possibility of billions of deaths. The next deadly strain ‘may arrive any day now,’ he wrote, pointing particularly to pig flu because of genetic similarities to humans. Other scientists have pointed to the risk of swift transmission of disease in an age of high global mobility, while others were alert for similarities to the 1918 Spanish flu, which killed more than 50 million people. Global health organisations, particularly the WHO, now hold themselves poised to coordinate analysis and recommendations on new flu strains. This is not simply science, then, but the result of talk amongst scientists and public health officials, with careers, funding decisions and institutional logics focused on seeing a particular object. When and if? the ‘big one’ appears, we will be ready, which is perhaps some comfort. But it is also worth remembering that not all major health issues get this focus. About 9.5 million children under five die every year around the world, up to half of them because of malnutrition, unsafe drinking water and poor sanitation (Unicef). Tobacco-related conditions cause about 5 million deaths a year (WHO). Why does the flu worry the world so much more?
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This blog aims to foster an interdisciplinary and global dialogue on the historical, social, and political dimensions of the pandemic. It will provide diverse perspectives from different corners of the world, and especially the Global South, bringing to the forefront variable and contested understandings of disease, science, and society.
The blog is a collaboration between the India China Institute and the Julien J. Studley Graduate Programs in International Affairs at The New School. It is co-edited by Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, Manjari Mahajan, and Mark W. Frazier.