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Essay

Flee! Fly! Flu!

By Kit Pancoast Nagamura


インフルエンザから逃げろ!

ゴールデンウィーク明けに始まった新型インフルエンザ騒動は、6月に入ってやや落ち着きを見せ始めている。 だが、これで安心するのは早過ぎる。 このインフルエンザを抑え込むために、私たちが知っておくべきことはまだまだあると筆者は言う。

Last week, I caught the Chuo Line train at rush hour, and inside, commuters were compressed like a rack of spareribs. A woman clinging to her plastic ring across the car from me started to clear her throat, an effort that segued into muffled coughs, and unfortunately ended with a salvo of loose barks, the kind one suffers with a bad cold. She covered her mouth as best she could, but people cast sideways glances at one another, and at the next station, the train car virtually emptied. I could see many of the same passengers surreptitiously re-boarding cars to the front and rear of mine. Were they fleeing the flu, I wondered, as I slid into an open seat several meters away from Coughing Lady.

When I related this incident to Japanese friends, their reactions were varied. Some listened carefully, but physically inched back from me as though I might be Typhoid Mary herself, or at least Swine Flu Suzie. Others were embarrassed, saying things along the lines of "Oh, it's silly the way we Japanese get paranoid in herds." The reactions of my foreign friends ranged from those who recommended attending a "Swine Flu Party"—a somewhat unpleasant shindig where your host serves up deliberate exposure to the flu in hopes that you will take home immunity—to those who had already stockpiled Tamiflu and face masks. Many voiced suspicions that the media were magnifying the problem, but others thought this flu a harbinger of worse things to come. Of course, there were a few fence-sitters joining me on my wobbly perch, watchful but not all worked up.

I have to say the flu scare has made me grateful for certain customs of daily life in Japan. For example, passing food directly from one set of chopsticks to another, supposedly taboo because it mimics the funereal rite of two people conveying the bones of the deceased into a burial urn, also happens to be a decent sanitary precaution. Bowing, of course, curbs hand-to-hand transfer of germs or bacteria. Wearing a face mask, to some degree, helps contain the spread of germs if one is sick, and leaving one's dirty shoes at the doorway is a brilliant idea. There are too many such examples to list, but in cities as tightly packed as modern Japan's, these traditional measures seem newly relevant. Maybe in centuries to come, Japan will be known for a ritualized hand-scrubbing ceremony.

Some claim that our current global economic illness will prove far more destructive than the H1N1 flu. Nonetheless, I think it's probably wise to see this strain as a dress rehearsal for a more serious plague. There's a lot we still need to know about how to suppress viral pandemics of influenza, and how to handle panic. For instance, if an infected person coughs or sneezes, just how far does the flu fly, and if you flee after someone has coughed flu on you, will you then simply spread the virus further? Until these questions have clear answers, I'll be that masked woman hogging the empty seat on the train.



Shukan ST: June 12, 2009

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