It’s been all but impossible to go anywhere in the past few days without hearing about the Swine Flu.  It’s been in the news.  It’s all over the blogosphere.  The Department of National Security has declared a national emergency.  It’s even got the President spending his time suggesting school closures.  And despite his admonition that the swine flu is “not a cause for alarm,” the sheer volume of chatter about this disease is itself a fair bit alarming.

From a research standpoint, I suppose that it is fair to say that the Swine Flu is potentially quite interesting.  As its name rather directly indicates, a primary characteristic of the Swine Flu is that it owes its lineage to swine, including the average farm pig.  In the pork farming context, it seems that this bug is a disease that we’ve known about for a rather long time.  It gets into farms, it infects pigs, and usually stays there.  This one, strangely enough, didn’t.  Plus, in an additional and even more interesting twist, this version of Swine Flu seems able to jump from human to human; a trait which, I gather, is fairly rare.  For people who want to know more about the animal to human pathway for disease, or who are into viral research in general, Swine Flu has all the makings of a very interesting case study.

Things all start to get a lot less interesting when you get down to the people whose only interest in the flu is a desire to not get sick from it.  For those of us out here in the larger world, all indications seem to be that the Swine Flu is, well, the flu.

For the average American, the flu is a pretty easy thing to understand.  If someone near you  has the flu, you should probably stay away from them and wash your hands a lot.  If you have the flu, you should probably stay away from other people, drink plenty of water, avoid doing things which are physically demanding, and try to sleep.  If you are at increased risk of complications from the flu because you are very young, old, or have a weak immune system, you should probably see a doctor, just as you would for any other illness.  If you work in a place where diseases spread easily (like a school), you should certainly wash your hands more often and encourage the people around you to do the same.  If things do start to get out of hand, we have effective antiviral drugs.

In all, this is the same game we play every winter when “flu season” rolls around.  Except that it probably isn’t even that bad; the World Health Organization tells us that “human infection with swine influenza was generally mild but is known to have caused severe illness such as pneumonia, ” and that “[n]one of the confirmed cases in the United States have had the severe form of the disease and the patients recovered from illness without requiring medical care.” (emphasis added)  Indeed, to date, the only reported death in the United States is a toddler visiting from Mexico.

Of course, this would all be so much entertainment if not for the looming specter of big government intervention to “manage” the “public health crisis.”  Egypt has already declared it intention to kill all the pigs, despite the international health community saying quite plainly that such measures are entirely unnecessary.  A bit closer to home, the operation of at least one school district in Texas has already been brought to a screeching halt as state authorities descended in response to two students contracting an illness that “hadn’t seemed that bad,” especially when compared to their winter flu season which dropped attendance among “roughly 11,000 students to 89%.”

Knowing that Obama feeds on public fear and crisis to advance his radical government expansions, is it even debatable that a beautifully manufactured health crisis is not the perfect vehicle to push forward his healthcare agenda?  It may be that the media was a bit too quick with this one, as most of the health bureaucracy’s top seats are still vacant, but it does appear to have helped shuttle at least one nominee through the process to confirmation and it is an educational experience in any case.  It is, if nothing else, just one more excuse for the federal government to spend money.

I see no health crisis here.