Mexican Swine Flu pandemic breaks out on Twitter

Judging by the talk on Twitter this weekend, you would think that Mexican Swine Flu is going to break out instantaneously, globally and be more deadly than 1918.

An excellent example in real time of how humans are totally crap at assessing risk, putting far more emphasis on Big! Scary! Now!. The media love these sort of things as people react to Scary Stuff by giving it massive attention. The blogosphere, being even less mediated by the media, has had its own pandemic of Swine Flu Fever (see the above graph from TechCrunch).

Lest we forget, c 100 people have died so far in Mexico - a country with a population of 110m people (ie 0.00009%). Over the last few days of this, and a few tens have had it in the Western world, pop c 1bn (ie where its measured) and have not in fact died, as the N1 strain is old and many people have antibodies established.

Conclusion is not therefore "Panic! There is a Pandemic!" but "What is it about Mexico that is killing people with this strain".

But thats not going to sell newspapers and drive blog traffic......

Anyway, over at Broadstuff Towers we have rushed out urgent research on how to avoid the pandemic on Twitter:

(i) Do not associate with people who transmit the Pandemic meme - wash your hands of them and unsub until they are seen to be uninfected

(ii) If you find you are infected by the Twitter Pandemic meme, disconnect immediately from the net, take 2 doctors and call us in the morning.

(iii) If you feel sweaty, and have flu like symptoms, there is a 90% chance you have a cold, a 9% chance you have Man-Flu, a 0.9% chance the heating is turned up too high, a 0.09% chance its all in the mind and 0.009% chance of too much spice in your Tandoori

(iv) Disconnect from this post immediately

By the way, in the same period, over a thousand people will have died of car accidents in these countries (about 1,000 people die daily in car accidents globally ). I can promise you that the Twitter and Blogosphere interest in this is minimal.