In retrospect, it's easy to lump swine flu in with avian flu, SARS and every other health scare that never really materialized over the past few years. But we didn't always know this. The problem with our attitude towards swine flu was that we, as individuals, treated it as a joke epidemic even before it was revealed to be one. We read the warnings on the news and the precautions from Dick's House, and then, for the most part, went on with our unhealthy lifestyles thinking that no disease would actually affect us. Because of our position in society and our previous exposure to diseases like these, we, as young people, have acquired an undue sense of invulnerability.
Let me lay out an all-too-real situation that should be self-evident in its irony: students discussing their fears about swine flu while playing pong. I can't imagine any better method of spreading the virus than bouncing a ball on a dirty floor and then dropping it in cups and sharing drinks from those cups, weakening our immune systems with alcohol in the process. Despite how much we read and said about the initial dangers of swine flu, it wasn't enough to stop us from playing pong, which indicates that we weren't actually afraid or cautious in the slightest.
Two friends of mine went to Dick's House around the height of the swine flu fear, in the midst of quarantines and daily e-mail updates from the administration. It was a weekend, so they met with the nurse who was on duty. When they asked to be tested for swine flu, she informed them that if they wanted to be tested, they had to be quarantined. And so they made the choice that most of us would have made: they turned around and walked away. Despite the fact that Dick's House was quarantining people, indicating the perceived severity of the disease, these students' fear of serious disease was not great enough to push them to place themselves in the hands of Health Services.
The last global pandemic that truly touched the lives of everyone was the Spanish flu of 1918. That definitely doesn't qualify as "in recent memory." In our lifetime, there has never been any widespread disease that would come knocking on our door and bring with it the legitimate possibility of death. In the past few years, however, we have heard about SARS and avian flu, both of which blew over and were discovered to be, at least in our world, relatively low-impact diseases. Maybe some of our lack of concern about swine flu comes from its similarity in name to avian flu. Bird? Pig? What's the difference?
But the instinct to disbelieve government and media warnings about epidemics is one that we should be very wary of. To the degree that we've been desensitized to these things, when something real does come around, our inaction could have more drastic consequences.
One of the true pandemics in the world right now is HIV/AIDS, which we believe we are very sheltered from, safe here in Hanover. Our firm belief in our safety from AIDS is evidenced by the statistics on how many young people still have unprotected sex, despite overwhelming evidence outlining the dangers of such risky behavior. Our belief that these types of diseases will never affect us directly is such that we can't even be bothered to put on a condom.
I can't say how much of this feeling of invulnerability from disease is due just to our youth, and how much is specific to our generation. Ignoring risks is an inevitable part of adolescence, after all. But we are old enough that we should be starting to outgrow this behavior, at least enough to heed the advice of Health Services and risk being quarantined for the sake of our own health and for the health of the rest of campus.
