Neither science, nor the politics in power, nor the mass media, nor business, nor the law nor even the military are in a position to define or control risks rationally.
Ulrich Beck
When the 2004 tsunami, one of the deadliest natural disasters of history, hit the Indian Ocean, it was believed that the Great Andamenese, Onge, Jarawa and Sentinelese — tribes living in the Andaman Islands for 60,000 years — would have been wiped out. But, later, reports emerged that they had survived. When modern science could not predict the impending earthquake, the hunter-gatherers apparently moved inwards from the coast days before the earthquake and tsunami struck, using knowledge gained from living in close communion with nature for millennia.
If natural disasters induce panic, so do pandemics. In recent years, we have seen a series of pandemics: AIDS, avian influenza, SARS and H1N1. Now, we are in the midst of an epidemic, Ebola, which — according to experts — can acquire pandemic proportions. Natural disasters and pandemics have existed in the pre-modern era as well but what is remarkable is that, in the modern era, the attitudes towards hazards — both natural and man-made — have drastically changed. Panic is the order of the day, especially in sanitised spaces of the developed West. Medical scholars, Luc Bonneux and Wim Van Damme, term panic itself as a pandemic.
As they point out, in 1999, Belgium slaughtered seven million chicken and 60,000 pigs when dioxin, a cancer-causing chemical, entered animal feed. Not one person died from dioxin poisoning. In 2005, the chief avian flu coordinator of the UN predicted that 150 million people could be killed by the flu. However, in 10 years, it has killed less than 400 people. The same apocalyptic predictions were made about BSE/CJD, SARS, and H1N1 as we ll.
Media coverage and the responses of governments and people to Ebola and recent pandemics tell us an important and paradoxical truth: we might be living in an era that is the apogee of human scientific advancements but this has not necessarily mitigated our fears and panic about potential dangers. This has led theorists to argue that we live in a ‘risk society’, a society that generates a lot of risks precisely because it is obsessed with, as the sociologist Anthony Giddens puts it, “the aspiration to control and particularly with the idea of controlling the future.” Traditional cultures did not have a notion of risk as diseases and natural disasters were taken for granted and were attributed to God or fate.
Interestingly, many of the risks in the modern era, as Giddens elaborates, are manufactured by the “very progression in human development, especially by the progression of science and technology.” Diseases caused by industrial pollution, natural disasters caused by environmental destruction, man-made disasters like Bhopal gas tragedy, Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear accidents, and latrogenesis — adverse effects caused by medical intervention and modern medicines — are examples of these manufactured risks. In the U.S., scholars estimate that 2,25,000 deaths annually are due to iatrogenic causes, and is the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer! Thus, science and technology itself generates new uncertainties as it banishes old ones and fear of the unknown cannot be eliminated by further scientific progress.
We have to read the coverage of, and response to, Ebola in this wider context of a risk society. Politics of fear, panic, and scaremongering are inevitable outcomes of such a society. Look at the panic around Ebola in the U.S., where so far not one citizen has died of the disease. A nurse returning after treating Ebola patients in Sierra Leone has won a court order against a mandatory quarantine order imposed by the state. Australia and Canada have imposed visa ban on citizens travelling from the affected countries, violating WHO’s International Health Regulations.
Renowned journalist Simon Jenkins argues that “we have lost control of the language of proportion” in responding to Ebola and other pandemics. Similarly, other journalists have severely criticised the media’s coverage of Ebola. The scaremongering is seen in absurd and irresponsible statements like Ebola is ‘the ISIS of biological agents!’ One major responsibility of the mainstream media, other than providing detailed and proper information about the disease itself, is to enlighten the public about the socio-economic and political conditions that govern health and healthcare systems in various societies, which in turn impact the origin and spread of pandemics. Without educating the public about the root causes that condemn the poorer parts of the world to bear the brunt of global pandemics, the media becomes a handmaiden of the powers — developed countries and pharmaceutical corporations — that control global health.
This lack of knowledge about larger forces also adds to risks and the resultant panic. Thus, in the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, the media’s role in the investigation of allegations of whether it was a false pandemic was nothing to be proud of. The head of health at the Council of Europe had raised questions about the role of pharmaceutical corporations in the declaration of H1N1 as a pandemic. Later, an investigation by the British Medical Journal found that medical experts advising WHO on H1N1 had financial ties with pharmaceutical companies producing the vaccine for the pandemic. As all the developed countries stocked up on the vaccines, reportedly, the pharmaceutical companies made profits ranging from $ 7-10 billion.
In this context, the media’s role in the coverage of pandemics raises questions. Where are the stories in the media about the lack of vaccines for Ebola, 40 years after the disease emerged? Or about the drug firms now in the race to produce a vaccine (the share prices of one of the companies ahead in the race have shot up exponentially)?
While certain prominent Western media houses have definitely pushed the panic button with regard to Ebola, the hard data about the overall coverage as studied by the Foreign Policy magazine indicates that it is not the case. But this study is merely restricted to the English language coverage. Further, the mainstream media has failed miserably in countering the serious issue of the racialisation of Ebola (as with AIDS before) as an African disease caused and spread merely by its cultural practices.
In a risk society, we have to confront new unknowns too, like social media and its impact. One media source called Ebola ‘the first major outbreak in the era of social media’. But, in the coverage of the outbreak, social media has reportedly been a negative force spreading misinformation and rumours that, in some cases, even led to deaths due to dangerous treatments administered.
Panic and fear cannot be the dominant motifs of the response to pandemics. Instead media and the larger society have to understand the structural causes for the origin and spread of pandemics and that the solutions lie not in piecemeal, panic-ridden responses governed by market forces, but in building robust public health systems that are focused on prevention. But beyond this, in the age of panic, we also have a lot to learn from the Andaman hunter-gatherers who show us that there is virtue in treading lightly on nature, and moving in tandem with its rhythms, rather than always seeking to control and conquer nature, as well as the future.
nmannathukkaren@dal.ca
