Introduction
Written by David Isaacs, the article Lessons from swine flu: Pandemic, Panic and/or Pandemonium? is a must-read article that reveals the devastating effects of the disease called swine flu otherwise scientifically identified as H1N1 influenza. The article provides an overview of how the swine flu disease affected Australia as a nation by providing a chronology of events that show how the disease came into the country, how it was spread, and how it was contained. The article by Isaacs tends to give a review of the swine flu situation and how it affected children as well as pregnant mothers in the whole nation. The article compares the effects of swine flu as a strain of influenza with the normal seasonal influenza that affects the nation every year. The purpose of the article as written by the author is to take stock of how the nation responded to the pandemic in a bid to find out its strong points as well as its shortfalls through the Australian ‘National Influenza Pandemic Action Committee’ (NIPAC) that was charged with taking control of the situation.
Treatment of the Disease
The article by Isaacs identifies the origin of the strain H1N1 virus as having come from Mexico, which is assumed to be the origin of the disease. The carriers of the disease are identified as New Zealand students who were coming from Mexico and who are suspected of having been infected with the disease. They are later on suspected to have infected other passengers on the flight who in turn spread the disease further to the nation. Swine flu is a highly contagious disease that spreads very fast in a given population group. Thus containing it is very complicated due to the mode of spread that the disease uses. Swine flu spread through the air and most people get infected when they breathe in such air (Saxena, 2012, p. 3268). In Australia, the outbreak of the disease coincided with the winter season in the year 2009. The writer points out how the disease complicates matters because most people could not tell the difference between swine flu and common influenza, which affects people around June, which is the onset of winter. The writer is critical of the response that the nation took through NIPAC because he finds that the nation overreacted in its control measures towards the disease. The article indicates that there was mass immunization of the population as a way of controlling the disease because a survey conducted later on about the disease, its spread, and the nation’s response indicates that the spread of the disease was not as big as it was projected to be then. Thus, the response was viewed as panic and over-reactionary. The article explains that Oseltamivir was used as the drug to contain the disease though it does not mention any other medication that was used beyond this one.
Global Perspective of the Disease
The article by Isaacs gives a very limited perspective of the disease on a global scale although the disease spread was global and fatal at the time that it happened. In his article, Isaacs shows that the disease was then at an international scale when he writes that it originated in Mexico and was brought to Australia by New Zealand students who were coming back from Mexico and who in turn infected other passengers who were in the same plane as them (Isaacs, 2010, p. 623). This claim is proven by an extract of the seating arrangement in the plane that indicated how passengers seated next to the students came back infected as compared to those who sat next to empty seats or those who sat next to passengers who were not students at that time. The global perspective of the disease as written by the author is relative to the reaction that other nations and international bodies took towards the disease. The writer indicates the American Centre for Disease Control as the one that took the first step in identifying the disease as swine flu or otherwise the H1N1 influenza virus. The disease is hereby depicted as highly contagious and easily spread from one nation to the other through so many ways that include movement of people across borders whether by air, cruise ships, train, or vehicles. This revelation is indicated in the writer’s article when he states, “In May 2009, a passenger cruise ship named the Pacific Dawn with 2000 passengers canceled its trip to the Great Barrier reef after three members of its crew tested positive for the swine flu” (Isaacs, 2010, p. 624). The words simply indicate that the disease was easily transmittable from a national or global perspective.
Conclusion
Though the article by Isaacs is supposed to be a critique of the nation’s response to the swine flu pandemic, the article comes out as a shallow critique of the nation’s response to the pandemic. The article does not give any figures that can be used to make a critical comparison of the response that the nation took and or compared to the writer’s views. It, therefore, comes out as a very general article that does not give out so much useful information on what it should.
Reference List
Isaacs, D. (2010). Lessons from Swine Flu: Pandemic, Panic and/or Pandemonium? Journal of Pediatrics and Child Health, 46(11), 623-626.
Saxena, R. (2012). The pandemonium of Swine Flu and its Prospective Drug Therapy. European Journal of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases, 31(12), 3265-3279.