Tuesday, April 28, 2009

The Flu, The Media and The People

Today I got involved in the preparedness work for the possibly pandemic swine flu. This is completely new to me, but it is quite interesting to see how these things work. It is also quite interesting to see how the media work from this perspective.

Ok, it was a very long time since I trusted what media reported, not since I worked with migration matters. But still this is new! The whole day I sat in conferenses with the responsible authorities and in our situation room. Still I get to hear a completely different story in the evening news on tv. Although they were referring to the same authorities and the information basically the same, the angle was quite different and it gave quite a different picture. But of course; if they would have just said what the authorities said and only talked about the confirmed cases it would not have been that spectacular and sensational...

However, I might not be the most suitable person to work with these matters. I might just be "too cool", I am just not the worrying kind. What I worry most about right now is that I might have to work this weekend. Instead of having a real long weekend. :-(

But on the other had there are persons who just worry too much. One of my colleagies got a call today from a person who wanted to know where he could find the hoarding lists. It took my colleague quite some time to figure out what the person meant, bt obviously he thought there were lists on things one might need to hoard in case one would get isolated. It took her even longer time to explain that there are no such lists and there is no reason for such lists and there will be no such lists nor reason to get isolated etc etc...

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