Friday, October 21, 2005

On a wing and a prayer ...

The Tablet wonders about Britain's response to a possible flu pandemic. The first coverage I've seen of the flu in a Catholic publication. Comparisons, naturally, to the black Death. Just a teeny weeny hint of smug anti-Americanism (it wouldn't be European othwerise, would it? Hmm -- is Britain European? I still think of the Continent ... oh well, that's another conversation).


After the mass casualties in the trenches, Britain had taken the Spanish flu in its stride. If an avian flu pandemic erupts, how will we react as a nation? After a long period of peace and prosperity since the end of the Second World War, we are unlikely to face the avian flu with anything like fatalistic equanimity.
Reading the runes of press coverage on the topic this past week, I was put in mind less of modern precedents and more of the historic example of that great fourteenth-century pandemic, the Black Death. During the Black Death many of the canny rich, guessing the contagious nature of the disease, quarantined themselves in bastions on protected hilltops waiting for the plague to spend itself.
[snip]


What has been noticeably absent, however, in the “flu frenzy” coverage is sober discussion as to how the medically unqualified healthy will be able to care for their sick families and neighbours, including people who live alone. We are not talking sophisticated medicine here. During the 1956 flu outbreak, when I was a pupil in a junior seminary, the entire college came down with flu, including all our teachers, the nuns who cared for us, and the local doctor. That is how pandemics strike within many communities: everybody gets it. For the space of one whole day and night just two boys were free of the illness. Instead of “heading for the hills”, they rolled up their sleeves. There was a lot to be done: making sure that we had sufficient liquid, changing sheets, emptying urine bottles, distributing aspirins: just the basic corporal works of mercy. Simple nursing of this kind during a pandemic could mean, in many cases, the difference between a patient overcoming the virus or succumbing to it.
[snip] (Yep, yep. This is the kind of thing I'm wondering abou when it comes to local preparedness)


The Christian faith was founded on the selfless, non-conditional love that is agape. Yet the focus of our ethics has, in different eras, and under various pressures, tended to shift towards preoccupations that have little or nothing to do with selfless generosity and care for our neighbours. Avian flu may well put the fundamentals of our faith to the severest of tests.
Very possibly. If it is even remotely like the Black Death, I suspect we'll see the whole gamut of human behavior, from the most vile and selfish to the most saintly and self-sacrificing.

The wealthy will, as is the way of the world, weather this better than the poor.

Among all the practical things, time definitely to pray that one be not "put to the test."

4 comments:

Sean said...

this is unrelated to the substance of you post, but...

i do find it interesting that in 1984 an english writer imagines that britain had been taken over by the united states, and continental europe went its own way.

Fr. Gaurav Shroff said...

Heh. What mean ye? :) But even the others, Eurasia and Eastasia, were quite totalitarian, ja?

St. Elizabeth of Cayce said...

Appropros of little in this particular post (except the Flu subject), I thought you'd be interested in knowing that H5N1 has been found in the UK.

In "an ex-parrot."

steliz,
pining for the fiords...

Fr. Gaurav Shroff said...

Yup, St. Liz -- I've not been flublogging much. There's just so much out there. Surinam is denying that the parrot got flu there, so it caught it in transit. Who knows. More worrying is a story elsewhere that China said it would close it's borders if there is evidence of even one human-to-human transmission well established. Sounds drastic, and increidbly impossible to enforce. However, containing the spread of the birds seems to be a little futile right now, it seems ...