Swine Flu party 1 – People awareness 0

There was much concern some time ago when the swine flu pandemics began to spread from Mexico to the USA and Europe. Then we somehow got overwhelmed by other information such as the Air France flight crash in the Atlantic or Michael Jackson’s death. Now it seems that the swine flu has come back again (or are the medias putting more emphasis on it?) as everyday more people get infected and die. The WHO (World Health Organization) increased the Pandemic level to Phase 6 -equal to widespread human infection- as shown in image below.

At the same time, a strange phenomenon is going on: the swine flu parties. What’s a swine flu party, you’ll ask? It consists of organizing a party where one of the attendee is someone infected with the Swine Flu virus. Therefore it pretends to help healthy people catch the virus and consequently grow immune against it. This very strange and unexpected practice is growing popular among people as we can read on this article on the Independant where this 15 year old girl states that she would “prefer to get it now, rather than next year which is my final GCSE year, and because apparently it’s going to be the winter version of the disease that will be more dangerous“. Reading this I started to look for further information and happened to be very surprised at people starting to organize parties and looking for infected people. A first look at Facebook (a reference when dealing with organizing a party) left me speechless…

Obviously, this practice is growing popular. People argue that they are used to doing the same with Chicken Pox for their children. But are they? Do people really do that?

Let’s get things straight and explain why I think this is an irresponsible behavior. It is understandable that some of the people think it is better to catch it now before it mutates and become stronger. Nevertheless there are way more risks than benefits to this kind of behavior:

• Nobody knows how will the virus act on every single person. We can’t yet plan its consequences and development so it is very risky. As declared Richard Besser (Head of US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ) “…how an individual person will be impacted by the infection is not something that we know“.
• We shouldn’t forget that once someone is infected, he’s likely to infect more people. Among them, some may be weaker: children, elderly people, pregnant women, with health condisions, etc and be seriously injured by the virus.
• …

For more information on the spread of influenza virus, have a look at this study “Modeling the Worldwide Spread of Pandemic Influenza: Baseline Case and Containment Interventions“.

Now I’m asking you: Would you go to one of them?

We recommend you to read:

• Is the Swine Flu infecting social medias?
• NIH public access policy made permanent, new challenges
• Free access to biomedical knowledge