Swine fever: an outbreak of media hype suspicion

As the World Health Organisation raises its swine fever alert to level five - indicating that a full-blown pandemic is 'imminent' - a debate has broken out as to whether the media are guilty of scaremongering. So far, the outbreak is confined to Guardian, though media observers expect it to spread quickly.

It began with the Guardian columnist Simon Jenkins (above, left) writing this week that the panic surrounding the global swine fever virus is just that - a panic, which is being "stoked" by both the media and health officials "in order to posture and spend". He says the dramatic headlines help to sell newspapers and enable drug companies to make a profit off the back of readers' fears.

In his view, we would all do well to sit down, take a deep breath and look at the facts. Yes, 2,000 people in Mexico have been diagnosed as suffering with a mutation of the H1N1 virus, but only 150-plus of those have died and health officials cannot prove a direct link between the majority of those fatalities and the virus.

The honeymoon couple from Airdrie, Scotland, who caught the flu on holiday in Cancun are on the mend and, so far, all of those showing signs of the illness, including the 12-year-old girl from Devon, are people who have traveled to Mexico.

(He wrote his column before the latest confirmed case in Spain, of a man who had not visited Mexico himself, but appears to have caught it from his girlfriend who recently returned from the country.)

We've been here before, said Jenkins - with the BSE scare of 1995, the Sars outbreak in 2003 and, most recently, the fears over avian flu in 2006 when the WHO issued a statement proclaiming that "one in four Britons could die".

Ben Goldacre says the big issue raised is the public’s distrust of the media

"Epidemiologists love the word 'could' because it can always assure them of a headline," said Jenkins, pointing out that while the media declared the bird to be public enemy number one, MRSA and C difficile were stalking hospital wards up and down the country.

If Jenkins represents the voice of reason, not everyone agrees. Ben Goldacre (above, right), doctor and author of the Guardian's 'Bad Science' column, rejects the idea of a media panic. After fending off phone calls from TV and radio stations asking him to take the Jenkins line, he says the big issue raised by the swine flu scare is the public's attitude of distrust towards the media.

He argues that, as society's watchdog, the media are merely doing their job by warning people about the risks of the virus but concedes that the lack of concrete evidence and factual information has made it a difficult task.

Referring to the figures being bandied about - '40 per cent of the world could be infected', '120 million could die' etc - Goldacre says that these are indeed possible risks, even if they don't actually become a reality. He challenges Jenkins with regard to his claims about previous health 'scares' such as Sars and avian flu, explaining: "They were risks, risks that didn't materialise, but they were still risks. That's what a risk is. I've never been hit by a car, but it's not idiotic to think about it."

Early signs of the debate spreading to the United States have been detected, after the news channel CNN charged the social networking site Twitter with becoming a "hotbed of unnecessary hype and misinformation" regarding swine flu.

However, Al Tompkins, a professor of broadcast and online news at the Poynter Institute in America, argues that the public needs journalists to put across the risks of a swine flu pandemic and, on the whole, is doing a good job. "Bad news always travels faster than good news," he says. "I'm sure that was true in smoke-signal days."