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Horizon, BBC2 - Flu hysteria is strictly for the birds (comment on TV show)

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  • Horizon, BBC2 - Flu hysteria is strictly for the birds (comment on TV show)

    <TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width=480 border=0><TBODY><TR><TD class=artByline>http://www.theherald.co.uk/features/73878.shtml
    DAVID BELCHER
    </TD><TD class=artDate align=right>November 08 2006</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>
    "Doomed ? we're all doomed!" You couldn't watch the first-ever feature-length edition of Horizon without recalling these words of torn-faced wisdom, uttered by Dad's Army's Hielan' misanthrope Private Laurie, a man ever ready to perceive the worst in any situation, no matter how apparently promising.

    If you (wisely) avoided Horizon's powerful brand of hopeless gloom, let me explain. It set out to demonstrate how multi-millions of folk ? primarily those in their teens and twenties, at their corporeal peak ? are sure to perish within the next few years as all their internal organs suffer a gory meltdown when they contract the deadly H5N1 flu virus in a pandemic outbreak. Bummer, dude.

    According to Horizon, we are poised on the verge of a 21st-century plague that will kill one in 10 of us. Where once the long-running TV science show might have focused on the facts about Britain's brave race to develop an avian flu vaccine ? as it did in 1999 ? now it prefers to frighten us with fictionalised American depictions of impending global catastrophe. Scarier than the dramatised depictions, however, were the terse and confident predictions of the health experts. One after another, they vigorously assured us that the world was going to hell in a handcart. Next week. The day after tomorrow. Or maybe later today.

    Scariest of all was a chiselled Vin Diesel lookalike in glasses and a white lab coat: Greg Poland, director of the Vaccine Research Group at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, a man with a totally bald head that peaked in an eerie point. Here I'll confess that I'm hoping against hope that Greg's pointy head indicates that he's actually an alien being from Mars or someplace, dispatched earthwards as an advance guard for a full-scale invasion by pointy-headed outer-space goomers. Greg's here to demoralise us before his Martian comrades show up.

    This theory of mine may be incorrect. Wherever Greg's from, though, he sure demoralised me. "This is nature's bio- terrorism," Greg matter-of-factly insisted. He went on to point out that victims of the H5N1 virus "literally drown or suffocate in their own secretions ? that person is doomed to die."

    Other experts pointed out that the flu pandemic will spare nobody, causing huge numbers of deaths very quickly. In addition, 40% of the global workforce will stay at home, wearing face masks and quaking with fear, rather than toiling for their employers. The wimps.

    Hospitals will be overwhelmed. Mobile morgues will need to be parked on city streets. Mass public gatherings at sports events will be banned, thereby causing Partick Thistle to have the Champions League title snatched from their grip.

    Scariest of all was the monochrome film footage of real-life victims of the last such major pandemic, the Spanish flu outbreak of 1918. Reduced to drooling zombies they were, the poor souls, by what was then called encephalitis lethargica. Less scary were the mini-dramatisations showing the kind of panicked all-American hoo-hah which would accompany the killer flu's eventual arrival in America. The biggest problem with them was that they weren't very well acted, but it didn't help that their teenage principal characters, the ones apparently most at risk from flu, were uniquely unsympathetic. He was sullen; she ? get this! ? wanted to be a TV journalist. Doubtless of the sort that would create a show like Horizon. Ha!

    I'll end with positive advice of the type that Horizon manifestly failed to deliver. Here goes. Avoid live chickens. Avoid dead chickens being gutted in the streets of south-east Asia. Avoid all live birds. Coughs and sneezes spread diseases; trap them in your handkerchief. Try not to breathe in. I think that covers it.

    Aye, you'll never go bust by reminding folk ? with 100% certainty ? that it's all going to end in the grave.

    .
    "The next major advancement in the health of American people will be determined by what the individual is willing to do for himself"-- John Knowles, Former President of the Rockefeller Foundation

  • #2
    Re: Horizon, BBC2 - Flu hysteria is strictly for the birds (comment on TV show)

    If you'd like to see the program for yourself, it is supposed to be available here:
    Horizon tells amazing science stories and reveals worlds you've never seen before.


    Nevermind unless you are a UK resident.
    Last edited by Niko; November 8, 2006, 12:14 AM.
    "In the beginning of change, the patriot is a scarce man (or woman https://flutrackers.com/forum/core/i...ilies/wink.png), and brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for it then costs nothing to be a patriot."- Mark TwainReason obeys itself; and ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it. -Thomas Paine

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