The Epidemics of the United States of America

The recent outbreak of swine flu has brought an abnormal influx of accusations and what Howard Markel and Sam Potts call "reflexive scapegoating" in their Op-Ed piece found in the New York Times in regards to the history of epidemics and our subsequent reaction to those epidemics.

Since the cholera outbreak in the late 19th century, public health/medical officials have been doing their best to control the disease and protect their constituency, but that ultimately does not protect the people from their own scramble in confusion and misinformation that new age media has brought to the globalized world. It is as easy as what I am doing right now. The ability for individuals to use the computer and Internet to reach almost anywhere and anyone in this country is revolutionary and it has been changing media vastly, through the addition of tools such as blogs, Twitter, and social networking sites that allow you to post your own version of what is going on. Markel and Potts go on to speak about recent reports involving advice from politicians to have "migrant mexican workers be turned away from hospitals", and "a rash of scurrilous posts on the Internet attributing the outbreak to their “dirty” ways of life". It is growing ever-important that we use reliable and efficient forms of information, but I will tell you, it is disheartening to hear that there are so many uneducated people making remarks absolutely uncalled for on the Internet and through blog sites. (Perhaps this is why we get the swine flu stories in the first minute of the News Broadcast. It is what the people are all talking about.)

Finally, Markel and Potts make a tremendous point in that the country can take heart that we have diligent and remarkable health officials and doctors working around the clock to minimize the effects of a new strain of disease, specifically flu, within the United States, and it will only get better in the future.