Swine Flu

When Parliament takes a much-needed break in the summer, the attention-grabbing headlines which so often rely on political developments tend to dry up. The final Question Time before September gave some clue as to the story that may carry newspapers through the silly season: swine flu. Question Time is an intriguing political program in which audience members award populist statements from the panel, and themselves, with regular rounds of applause. There was a lot of a sentiment surrounding the belief that the media were over-exaggerating the risk of swine flu. One man said that the mortality rate was no higher than for seasonal flu. It may be true that the people who are dying are people with underlying health problems, but the potent fact is that swine flu is spreading fast outside of the traditional flu season. Clive James was perhaps the most reassuring voice when he put our public health in a 50-year context, remarking that our ability to provide vaccines now is far removed from a time not so long ago when polio would visit every street, and whither the limb of a child. Our public health system has indeed come a long way since the founding of the NHS, which will be sorely tested if swine flu becomes a second Spanish influenza pandemic. Until a few years ago when I read about the life of Egon Schiele, who was a high-profile victim of Spanish flu, I wasn’t even aware of this aggressive disease that killed more people in two years than died in the entire First World War. The future of this current influenza is still highly uncertain, though history shows the potential dangers that may test our society.

Whether following an economic or in this instance a public health ‘crisis’ you can rest assured that the BBC will find an interesting way to map it.

This is a simple and efficient piece of design. With a scrollable timeline it makes clear the spread of swine flu from Mexico and the United States to Europe and Asia, and that the number of confirmed cases is mushrooming in Great Britain, unparalleled by other European countries. The important black nucleus of death, however, remains reassuringly small relative to the spread of infection. Whereas graphics such as these have been common to television news reports for years, their presence on the Internet has increased with the proliferation of plug ins (particularly Flash) that have become a standard for the vast majority of web users. The BBC also now embeds videos into the pages of BBC News, something that only became practical with the adoption of Flash, and the increase in bandwidth web users now enjoy. The archived pages of BBC News extending back to the late 1990s indicate stylistic and technological changes that have impacted on the overall design and format of the website, from a time when bits of data trickled to and from a dial-up modem and manifested themselves on a fat, low-resolution CRT monitor, to today, where you will have a better setup. Hopefully. The best reason being the ability to enjoy the BBC News website it all its glory.

To end on a note somewhere closer to swine flu, here's an interesting Flash game where you try to wipe out humanity with a pandemic of your creation: Pandemic II. It is not an attempt at scaremongering.