Are We All Going to Die of Media Panic?

Since January, Hong Kong’s leading dailies have served up an astonishing average of two fresh health scares per month (except for August when, presumably, everyone was away on holiday). Some scares appeared just briefly: Hairy crabs bearing liver-damaging antibiotics scuttled briefly across the front page in September, tainted scallops came and went within a week in March and feverish snails from China have been slithering around the edge of the radar all year. Other health scares have found a more permanent place on the menu. Swine fever (streptococcus suis type two) has been mentioned on an almost weekly basis. It’s caused by bacteria transmitted from pigs to man and was first recognized in the 1960s but may have been around for as long as pig farms.

But the “Big One” - the real scare du jour - is Avian Flu. As of press time, the virus (H5N1) has so far killed just 64 people globally (more will die crossing the street tomorrow) and all of its victims caught the disease handling chickens. Currently, humans do not catch it from other humans. And the virus dies in chicken meat when cooked above 70 degrees centigrade. But the World Health Organization believes there are signs H5N1 is about to “jump the species barrier and become transmissible between humans.” If that happens then, well, we have all read the quote from Dr. York Chan, Hong Kong’s minister of Health, Welfare and Food: “Perhaps the whole world will collapse.” The World Health Organization (WHO) is somewhat less poetic: “Seven to 10 million people may die globally.”

But let’s stop calculating imaginary corpses for a moment and be really, really cynical. Instead of examining the bleak side of potential virus pandemics, let’s look at the bleak side of very real panic pandemics.

The Power of Suggestion

“There are always people who do well out of health scares,” says Tim Hamlett, a media behavior analyst and Associate Professor of Journalism at Hong Kong Baptist University. “Some people stand to gain power, money and a savior-like status from leading the charge – whether or not the danger is real. I would not say that the threat of H5N1 mutating into a pandemic virus is not real on some level. But it is worth remembering that mass panic – particularly if is it driven by large amounts of money, power and opportunism – has a way of justifying itself.”

A clear example is the “Millennium Bug,” which was supposed to bring computers crashing when they clicked over to the year 2000 - and end civilization as we know it. “That was a great example of how fear was stoked and exploited by a few opportunists,” says Prof. Hamlett. “The interesting thing is most of the people who joined what briefly became a large industry actually believed their own hype. The press bought into the idea and helped promote these people as saviors. And so a kind of communal hypnosis developed.”

One local favorite is the mysterious virus that swept through Hong Kong schools in the late 1980s. “Children suddenly started developing a rash on their arms, legs and stomach. They were feeling sick, getting panic attacks and having to miss school,” explains Prof. Hamlett. “It spread around Hong Kong like wildfire. Classes were closed. Doctors presumed it was a contagious virus and there was quite a panic among local people. Turned out that some children simply get a harmless rash from time to time and when they got time off school for it, other children decided to copy them by scratching their arms and legs and get time off as well. Some of the remaining children simply got ill and anxious thanks to all the press concern and the power of suggestion.”

The mysterious Hong Kong rash never returned once the holidays started. But the power of media suggestion has continued to wreck havoc in classrooms around the world. During the first Gulf War in 1991, when the American press was full of fanciful stories about a possible poison gas attack in New York, a child at a school in Rhode Island fainted. At the same time classmates detected a strange odor. A wave of anxiety swept through the school and children started dropping like flies in the apparent belief they were experiencing an Iraqi chemical attack. In all, 18 students and four teachers were hospitalized. Doctors diagnosed anxiety but nothing else. When the “victims” were told there was nothing wrong with them they quickly recovered. In our region, there was a similar scare in Manila a few weeks after the 9/11 attacks – this time triggered by mass phone messages warning of an imminent bio-terrorism attack. Some 1,400 students flooded local clinics suffering mild flu-like symptoms. Once again doctors found little beyond anxiety.