A post by revere at Effect Measure reminded us that the pandemic preparedness initiative had an intrinsic ineptitude to it.  “CDC had been training state labs to make the differentiation between the two seasonal flu subtypes, H1N1 and H3N2, and bird flu, H5N1, so the capability to do seasonal subtyping already existed outside of CDC. But neither the reagents nor the proficiency for the new swine virus did.”

In other words, everyone had their guard up – but not for the right thing.

How was the public health apparatus so beguiled by the possibility of disaster that, when a relatively mild outbreak of flu took shape, the entire public health industry responded as if disaster were truly at hand?

To investigate, we tracked mentions of flu in news articles (letters and op-ed pieces were not included) published in the NY Times.  The pattern turned out to be revealing about how a pandemic is made.

From 1981 through 1996, inclusive, there were between 5 and 16 stories on flu each year – with the exception of 21 articles in 1986 (when a very mild flu season was predicted and a rather severe flu season surprised people).  On average, the Times ran 8.7 stories per year in that period.

Flu fever at the Times spiked in 1997, when the first cases of avian flu were announced and there was interest in how the W.H.O. would handle it.  Through 1999, there were 20-25 stories per year, an average of 22 – about two articles per month.

But in 2003, which was both the year of SARS and the peak of the bioterrorism-preparedness psychosis, coverage exploded:  the Times ran 50 stories on flu.

In 2004, the failure of any bioterrorists to take the field forced the Bush administration to claim that it wasn’t bioterrorism it had been worried about, it was pandemic flu.  As that administration was always a fountain of unassailable truth, it will be recalled, Secretary Tommy Thompson’s August ’04 Pandemic Preparedness plan convinced many people that flu is our real security problem.  The Times complied, running 130 articles on flu in 2004, with a slight fall-off thereafter.

If you were a dedicated Times reader, you had encountered an article on flu roughly every six weeks back in the early ‘90s.  But by 2006 you read about flu twice a week, on average.  And that was often in the context of pandemic preparedness.

The Washington Post’s pattern was similar (differences in the Post’s search engine and archive arrangement required a slightly different analysis), but its coverage was even more flu-prone.  A dedicated Post reader saw five articles on flu in the A section each week, by 2006.

Does this mean that media created a flu crisis singlehandedly?  Of course not – media make stories, or deliver other people’s, but they alone can’t make crises.  Much of the coverage followed leads provided by scientists – who, let’s face it, have to make sure the grant money keeps flowing in their particular direction (that was the origin of the 1976 fiasco over swine flu vaccine).  And much of the crisis was driven by business, especially the growing market for flu remedies.

But the media analysis sheds some light on why the preparedness rhetoric was so powerful in shaping American public health around security – and therefore juicing up the current flu outbreak into a global crisis.

H1N1 flu is a health problem, sure.  As DemFromCT has been explaining, it’s a problem that can and should be dealt with through standard public health channels, and with a circumspect eye on what we know and what we don’t.

But if it weren’t for weak government, overeager scientists, and compliant media infusing flu with a global-crisis flavor, would it register as such a grand problem?  We feel sad about the 332 swine flu deaths, but we also recognize that that total equals just a few hours worth of mortality from TB or malaria in the poor parts of the world.

As for media, the number of flu deaths registered in the U.S. is almost exactly equal to the mortality on American highways on any given Saturday.  (At Effect Measure today, revere notices the similarity between seasonal flu mortality and vehicle-related mortality.  Alas, revere misses the larger point:  this similarity demonstrates that flu can be called a “crisis” when it causes far lower mortality than usual, whereas highway accidents are never called a crisis.)

Any preventable death is lamentable, of course.  But you don’t read much about an epidemic of vehicle crashes in the papers.

n.b.  This is a slightly amended version of the original post, which because of faulty hyperlinking, improperly implied ineptitude where there wasn’t any.