The flu, like the bubonic plague, can be a great leveller. We ALL fall down, as the gruesome nursery rhyme from the plague years recites. A few smug people in our office have not succumbed, but others have had their first sick day in decades. It is real flu, not cold snuffles that people call the flu. The worst is the aching joints and gruesome headaches.
Usually a bout of real flu in the town will bring on the soothsayers. One day the Spanish flu will return, they say. This was the pandemic (world wide) immediately after World War I that killed more people than the war itself. About 20 million people died, more than in any outbreak of disease before or since. Even the plague in the 14th century killed fewer, though it killed a much greater proportion of the population.
Maybe they are right.
I have some additional thoughts. A colleague, who also got hit, said he was in the dengue fever stage. Dengue fever used to be called “breakbone fever” because it causes back and bone pain, just like this flu.
Dengue is like a whole lot of other diseases rampant in Africa and Central America, large borne by insects and parasites: malaria, Rift Valley fever, sleeping sickness and bilharzia.
About 500 million people in Africa are infected with malaria.
Most people in Africa most of the time are suffering some disease equal or worse to our flu. Imagine having the flu all the time.
Normally, I am among the smug. But not this time. I crawled home to bed at 4pm on Tuesday.
The phone rang and somebody wanted something legalled before publication. “”Yeah, just read it to me. That’s sounds okay.”
I should have, but physically could not, get out of bed and logged in to read the words. Next morning I forced myself to the University of Canberra to give a lecture, making a complete botch of it.
The point is, you cannot do mental work, let alone physical work. Is it any wonder much of Africa’s productivity is so low. Most of them have the equivalent of flu a lot of the time. Very little is spent on the elimination of malaria, bilharzia or TB. Africans have had to learn to live with them. Yet it would not cost a huge amount to make such a huge difference, compared what we spend in the west trying to convince people not to eat so much to lower heart-disease risk.
Human suffering aside, the economic benefits of attacks on these diseases would be immense.
The west has been fairly quick to respond to ebola outbreaks in Africa because it is seen as a huge danger if it spreads to the west. It has a very high mortality rate — higher than 90 per cent; it kills very quickly; and it is very contagious. But these terrifying elements of the disease in fact make it less destructive. It is killing its hosts so quickly that it has nowhere to go. Nonetheless, fear, however misplaced, is a great motivator. We react to short-term possibilities and the immediate.
We should, of course, be doing more about all the diseases in the long term. It can pay off, both economically and in reducing human suffering. Smallpox was defeated. We came very close to eradicating polio. Worse, malaria and tuberculosis could have been eradicated for want of quite trivial sums at critical times. Now it looks much less hopeful.
Even at home, something like the flu has little immediate impact, certainly none which can be added up by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. So basic health research has not rated in this election.
Indeed, this election campaign has been, like most, wallet-retentive. But it has also differentiated between Australians more than any other I can remember. The two tax packages were laced with tables and examples to work out to the nearest dollar how much “”better off” every conceivable category of person would be. A single person on $35,500 with two children will get $28.40 a week under Labor’s package. A married person with spouse at home and superannuation on $62,300 will get $81.24 a week under the Coalition package.
Well, they can both get the flu, or worse, and it won’t matter a fig what their new tax rate is.
For the nation that produced Frank Fenner, MacFarlane Burnett, Howard Florey and Peter Dougherty, why hasn’t medicine figured in this campaign other than the petty squabbling over the tax deductibility of health insurance.