No one can tell me if Ebola is the worst plague since, variously, Aids, Sars, BSE or the black death. All I hear is that it “might” be. I do not mind being told no one knows. But what do I make of a prime minister who emerges from his Cobra bunker and declares “a very serious threat to the UK”, a US president who says it is “spiralling out of control”, and a World Health Organisation that says it is “the most severe health emergency seen in modern times … a potential threat of an unparalleled human catastrophe”? We have lost control of the language of proportion. The result is an outbreak of crying-wolf syndrome. David Cameron and his cabinet currently tell me to be scared witless by Ebola, an attack from Isis, a resurgent Russia and global warming (sometimes). In July, the prime minister said we face being “cast back into the dark ages of medicine” because of a new strain of superbugs. This was capped two months later when Stephen Hawking declared that “the God particle could destroy the universe”. In small print it said this was “very unlikely”, but how unlikely is very? The one sure pandemic is panic. In 1997 we were told that bird flu could kill 2 billion people worldwide. In ... theguardian/commentisfree/2014/o...
Posted on: Fri, 17 Oct 2014 11:33:09 +0000
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