Swine flu teaches old lessons
2nd May 2009


In 1665 Daniel Defoe, merchant and writer, chose to remain in London during an outbreak of the plague that killed 100,000 of his fellow citizens. Defoe had the means to leave: he was wealthy and well connected. He stayed to protect his property and, he admitted, with a desire to observe the human condition in extremis.

From that experience Defoe wrote A Journal of the Plague Year, and as an account of how to ride out a pandemic it’s as coherent as anything you’ll find today. Defoe, sensibly, stuck to the facts, meticulously chronicling the efforts of public health officials to turn back the plague by closing the ports and quarantining early cases (along the way he reveals the origins of the word ‘quarantine’ – the French for ‘forty’, the number of days an infected person was to be kept out of circulation).

He recounts the many strategies used by the populace to ward off the plague or to treat the infection. He is fascinated by the symptoms and progress of the disease: from the first tell-tale blotches to the lolling corpses with blackened limbs and swollen tongues. He is shrewdly critical of quacks peddling opportunistic treatments and clergy who fled at the first sign of trouble.

But it is Defoe’s fascination with statistics that makes his account seem thoroughly modern. Time after time he returns to the daily death tolls collected by parish officials (that there was a functioning bureaucracy in 1665 is startling in itself). He pores over the figures, lining them up in tables and columns, discovering trends, mining the data for cause and effect, striving to get to the bottom of things.

Defoe’s behaviour may have been unusual in its day but he would have slotted right into this week’s swine flu story. What is it about human nature that makes disaster so compelling? All our instincts are programmed towards survival and yet at the smallest opportunity most of us will run towards a fire or chase a tornado.

So it is with swine flu. We are drawn towards it like moths to a flame, creeping closer, wide-eyed and fearful, reaching out a finger to prod the fleshy mass that may turn and bite us at any moment.

We cannot resist flirting with mortality. We want to observe every blotch appear on every forearm, every blackened corpse cast into the pit.

Thanks to Defoe’s heirs we can. The media allows us to indulge our fascination from the relative safety of our armchairs. This week we’ve been served swine flu by a thousand breathless reporters. The numbers affected, miniscule by any standards, are nevertheless polished up to impress. Is it 14 cases confirmed, or 16?

Everybody who can stand upright and speak is interviewed; from the perky Northcote College student to the mayor of Greymouth. The only player in this story whose voice is missing is the swine who started it all.

In the midst of all this our public health officials stick to the story and so far they’ve been brilliant. In interview after interview they resist the media hype. Calmly and firmly they describe their actions and options. If this was part of their pandemic training it’s working well.

Health officials know that in the public’s eye they will lose whatever the outcome. If by their efforts we avoid a full scale pandemic they will be condemned for exaggerating the risk. If they cannot stop the disaster they’ll be damned for doing too little.

Whichever way it goes, will swine flu teach us anything? What Defoe could not have realised was the plague he lived through was the last of its kind. Within 15 years plague had vanished from the globe.

Like Defoe we cannot know what lies ahead. But we may note his wry observation that when the plague had passed, the gratitude and goodwill of the survivors barely outlasted the disease. They simply became caught up in the next awful story.