“What is that white stuff below?”
“Clouds. We are over them.”
“Humans are very clever!”
The above was the conversation between my wife and I when we were on board an airplane. She marveled at the cleverness of humans. She marveled at mankind’s technological breakthroughs, one of which was responsible for our being able to be above the clouds.
Technology wise humans are very clever, much cleverer than just inventing the airplane. But are they really clever?
Take for example the present threat to public health of the new flu. Humans are overconfident in this case.
They don’t completely understand how nature works but pretend that they do. The “2003 SARS outbreak” caught them off guard. People seem never to learn a lesson from history. They don’t know that the 21st century may probably be the century of epidemics just as they don’t know how fragile the global ecological balance can be or how great global climatic changes can be.
Often, economic and political considerations make people neglect the findings of science.A case in point is that the World Health Organization (WHO) changed the name of the new flu from swine flu to influenza A(H1N1) in order to save the livestock industry. Another example is the WHO's reluctance to raise the level of influenza pandemic alert from phase 5 to phase 6. Still another example is that the Obama administration wants to focus their attention on solving the financial crisis and neglect the threat of the new flu. They are putting mankind at risk.
True
Comments (8)
clever, but a little short-sighted. people will often opt for quick-fixes that don't hold well over time, which is partially to blame for the superstrains that have been plaguing us as of late. the examples you gave were of individuals or organizations with great political interest and variegated motives that don't necessarily mesh with fighting the flu pandemic. it's not due to a lack of cleverness, more to a difference of priorities.
What would you have the government do? The same thing they did in 1976, when more people died from the inoculations (and side effects from the inoculations) than the actual swine flu itself?
You're fear-mongering. Chill out... diseases are always around us. This is nothing like SARS. Just because H1N1 is now a pandemic doesn't mean it's any more deadly than the flu that people get every winter; it's just more widespread.
I still think that humans are pretty clever - I mean, we've come a long way. However, it is foolish to dismiss things as insignificant when they could be potentially serious.
Nah, all of our civilization and relative understanding of the nature and the physical universe at large is just luck.
The reason why the swine flu is commonly ignored is because, for most people, it is not a threat. There have been less than two hundred deaths. I should be more afraid of getting into a car, or possibly swimming in less than an hour after I eat. 200 deaths, while obviously horrible for those 200 people and their family members, is seriously insignificant, especially when taken on a global scale. In every way, it is simply the flu. The flu that near anyone can combat if one has an uncompromised immune system.
Hum, that post seems really familiar...
. Nice to see you getting featured!
As long as the flu drugs remain effective, I don't see such a serious threat.
I don't know that I find us very clever. I honestly don't think we've changed much since the dawn of time. Yeah, we've come a long ways with technological advances, but we still make the same errors that we did back then. We still are quite stupid, when you get down to it.
hey diseases will come and go, and sometimes some things just go out of our own hands.