When new illnesses emerge and we can't yet gauge their impact or severity, communities sometimes do things they come to regret.
The latest virus to circulate, H1N1, is clearly some cause for concern. It's shaken up people in Mexico City and the regions beyond, making them retreat to their homes. At times of risk, people understandably want to wait out the danger and take care of their families and themselves.
There's also evidence that the virus is weakening in force as it moves farther from its epicenter. As the strain loses strength, its capacity to wreak serious danger also diminishes.
Although people are justifiably concerned, now is the time to hold onto some perspective—indeed, to appreciate how we've tended to overreact to similar (and similarly described) concerns in the past.
Illnesses have a way of developing their own metaphors, which take hold of our imaginations and exaggerate the actual risks we face. Years ago, in 1978, Susan Sontag wrote a powerful, eloquent book, Illness as Metaphor, which looked at the way our culture tended regrettably to view TB and cancer in metaphorical terms. Those metaphors, Sontag observed, rebounded on the patient, making it seem as if they were somehow to blame for their condition.
Sontag followed up with Aids and Its Metaphors, a vivid but also depressingly accurate account of our making the same mistake with HIV. The word "Aids" became so powerful a stigma and taboo in the 1980s that Ronald Reagan saw out two terms as president of the country without even mentioning the virus that had wreaked havoc on especially the country's gay and black communities.
It's troubling to recall that time now—so much of our culture has moved on, even to the point of forgetting what we went through and how so many people suffered needlessly at the time from rejection by their neighbors, families, and community.
But all the talk about five-year-old Édgar Hernandez, whom several news outlets want to turn into Patient Zero for Swine Flu (perhaps because he's survived it), also makes me concerned that we're at risk of reviving our media's fascination with the so-called Patient Zero of HIV, a story that turned into a kind of hysteria and witch-hunt, even though there was no credibility at all to its premises. It circulated endlessly and needlessly all the same.
So I hope we'll learn something from the past this time about how to handle these situations and ourselves. Our Mexican communities are really hard-hit by the recession. Their labor—call it "sheer hard work"—helped give us a remarkable economic boom in the 1990s, with the real-estate market thriving partly because it relied strongly on a large upswing in new constructions. The hard graft of migrant workers, who were (and are) paid very low wages, also gave us cheaper food than we would otherwise have enjoyed. Such workers performed many jobs that Americans were not, let's face it, especially eager to do.
We need to acknowledge our debt to these communities and help protect them, not abandon them in their hour of need. We also need to address this new virus without metaphors. So let's give up the fantasy of identifying the patient zero this time and focus on the facts—just the facts.
Christopher Lane is the Pearce Miller Research Professor at Northwestern University and the author most recently of Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness.
