Revere over at Effect Measure, has been writing a lot recently about the so-calle “Swine Flu” outbreak; not suprising as the editors are public health practitioners. A post the other day caught my eye; it explored when is a pandemic not a pandemic. Basically Revere explores the position with the current Influenza A/H1N1 outbreak and touches on some of the posturing going on by governments, WHO etc. to avoid declaring this a pandemic.

Yes, all very well; this is what we would surely expect of politicians. What struck me though was this wonderful paragraph:

The argument boils down to this. We shouldn’t call a pandemic a pandemic, because people might misunderstand that this means it’s a pandemic. And then they would do things like panic, like UK officials are doing now when the prospect is broached we are having a pandemic. And since even the considerable wiggle room of the current definition of a pandemic is insufficient to avoid calling this one a pandemic, please provide us with some more wiggle room by adding severity to the mix, so we can then argue about whether the pandemic is severe enough to be a pandemic.

The original post isn’t technical and it isn’t long but it does highlight the way in which governments etc. use as much (and more) wriggle room as is available in their own interests. Politics was ever thus!