For internet news junkies, the panic du jour is the Ukrainian flu outbreak. If you haven’t heard about it, you’ve been missing out. In the past two weeks, over a million people have gotten infected with the mystery flu, though with the oddly small death total of (at last count) just under 300.
This isn’t swine flu, mind. As per the article, we’re dealing with less than 100 cases of H1N1, and less than twenty of them were fatal. Rather, it’s a mysterious illness, one with frightening infection rates, albeit low mortality.
Naturally, panic has spread in some quarters, as the deaths that have occurred were especially grisly, one doctor saying the deads’ lungs looked as though they’d been burned. However, something is strange here.
For one, the infection went from zero to nearly a hundred thousand almost overnight. Remember swine and bird flu? There were early warning signs in a few areas of Mexico and Asia (respectively), a couple of infections that looked as though they could turn into the next big problem. It was quite some time before H1N1 went from media darling to full-on pandemic. In the Ukraine, by contrast, there was absolutely no warning. Everything was fine, and then the country was on quarantine. Within two weeks it went from 80,000 to over a hundred thousand to 750,000 to over a million.
Compounding that, the infections haven’t spread, geographically speaking. Oh sure there have been H1N1 cases in Russia and the surrounding area, but remember that we’re not talking about H1N1. Rather, the million-plus infections have all remained within the western chunk of the Ukraine. That is incredibly odd for a virus that’s so contagious it’s been growing on a near logarithmic scale.
By way of contrast, consider our other two pandemics. Remember the maps for swine flu that The Daily Show so effectively mocked? Tracking the swine flu was an exercise in hilarity, seeing huge countries colored in red because there were a dozen infections in that area. The swine and bird flu each took some time to warm up, with infections worldwide that slowly spread into their local populations.
According to the frenzied reports, the Ukraine has a flu that came out of nowhere, spread like wildfire, but didn’t move beyond the borders of the Ukraine. Hell, it didn’t even move into eastern area of the damn country. All the million-plus infections are on the western half of the nation, and have not budged beyond. If this was an actual viral explosion, then anyone traveling into and out of the country in the first seven days would have taken it with them, and with the speed of the infection within the country half of Europe would have been in the hospital by now.
So we’ve got a virus that supposedly spreads like wildfire, but hasn’t left the Ukraine and kills somewhere around 0.02% of those infected with it. We’re left with two possibilities:
- The stories are true, which would point toward a biological or chemical attack, which would rather nicely explain why there have been so many infections in such a small area.
- The stories are are the result of mass hysteria, which would explain why for such a supposedly horrific virus only a teeny number have died and why only a whopping two have had the “burnt lungs” effect.
Extra strange is that the western media hasn’t really touched it. Normally if there’s a whiff of medical catastrophe anywhere in the world, it’s all over the CNN/MSNBC/FOX triumvirate. Bird flu, swine flu, mad cow, you name it. The moment a few people die anywhere in a potentially pandemic-triggering way our American media eats it up. We love our pandemics, but this one? Not so much. Maybe even the US media realized the story wasn’t going anywhere.
