El Gordo

‘This is it - the pig one!’
In Mexico - where the outbreak began - there are now 26 confirmed cases. Some reports say as many as 149 people may have died from swine flu, but WHO officials put the figure much lower and said only about 20 of the deaths could be definitely attributed to swine flu.

The thing with diseases is not that people die of them, but how many die out of those who catch it. With SARS the death rate is about 10%: roughly ten or twelve people will die for every hundred who get infected. That’s very high. People are right to be worried about SARS, but it’s not in quite the same league as The Black Death, which slashed Europe’s population by a third in the late fourteenth century. If you caught that one, it was pretty much curtains for you, really. Once you started sneezing it was all over bar the buboes.
So what concerned me was the death rate. It’s really impossible to judge from such a small number of cases, but I guess that is rather worrying if twenty out of twenty-six have succumbed. That’s a seventy-seven percent death rate, which would mean you would have less than a one-in-four chance if you came down with it. Now that’s well into the Black Death kill ratio.
Mind you, if - as the report appears to suggest - one hundred and forty nine people have died out of only twenty-six infected... then we are dealing with a disease of terrifying potency, one that kills through the power of suggestion. In that case, the thing we should most fear is fear itself.
Actually, a bizarre hysterical illness known as Grisi Siknis has been reported just lately in Mexico’s near neighbour, Nicaragua;

"Grisi Siknis turns people into witches and they go crazy," [said traditional healer Doña Porcela]. Last year there were 65 cases of Grisi Siknis, which translates from the local Miskito language as ’crazy sickness’. It behaves like a virus, sending teenager after teenager into a frenzied state followed by long periods of coma-like unconsciousness...

Of course, some uncharitable souls may suggest that sounds like normal teenage behaviour anyway, but I can’t help wondering if this is more than just a coincidence. During both World Wars, army doctors noted many cases of hysterical syphilis, as shell-shocked soldiers believed they were dying, and exhibited very real symptoms, yet showed no trace of infection. In our fevered climate of crisis and anxiety, I would not be surprised to see more casualties from imagined illness than the real thing. I expect to see London anonymised behind face masks by the end of the week.