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Injecting Racist Hysteria

How Media Coverage of the 2009 H1N1 (Swine Flu) Virus Raises Questions about Border Security, NAFTA, and Mexican Representation in U.S Culture

Vincent Q Pham, Author
Introduction, page 2 of 9
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What is Swine Flu?


Before we can concentrate on this project’s main focus on the social consequences, we must understand how a flu virus works. Otherwise we disregard important information on how outbreak narratives can use science as a framing tool to spread further social fear. Let’s begin with a NPR animation explaining how a flu virus can trick a single cell body into producing millions of more viruses to help spread the disease.

 

Although the video has great animations and clear analogies, it is obvious that the video could use more in-depth analysis. That is why this next video specifically focusing on swine flu is useful to have. In particular, concentrate at the 0:58 mark of the video in order gain the most relevant information relating to the previous video. 


So what exactly is the H and N spike that the video was talking about? What does H1N1 even mean? For further clarification, we turn to Robert Wallace, an evolutionary biologist, public health phylogeographer at the University of Minnesota, and blogger of the site "Farming Pathogens", which details how humans contribute to the making of diseases. 

Wallace states that "the 'H' refers to hemagglutinin molecule. That's a molecule on the surface of the influenza that allows the virus to key into its target cell. 'N' refers to neuraminidase. That's the molecule also on the surface of the influenza, but it allows the influenza, once it's born, to key out of the cell that it's been replicated in." To connect this information back to the first video we watched, the "H" is the key that allows the virus to get inside the cell's "factory" and the N is what allows the production of the virus to be spread to other cells.

Wallace goes on further to say that there are many different types of H and N molecules, offering up many different possible ways for them to recombine, with H1N1 being one of its most prominent combinations. Historically, this H1N1 strain was the same influenza pathogen that caused the 1918 pandemic that killed 50 to 100 million people around the world. Since then, our bodies have become more immune to the descendants of that strain, up to a point in which it has simply devolved into seasonal influenza. 


(Image source: http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/which-flu-virus/)

However, Wallace cautioned at the time that the 2009 H1N1 case was different because in addition to the H1 and N1 molecules, it "has genes from other organisms". The 2009 H1N1 flu was a mutant form that had genes from swine, human, and bird flu. The newness of the virus was why it was portrayed as in the framework of a pandemic that could kill millions at the time of its reported initial outbreak. What made this situation even more concerning was that swine and seasonal flu could coexist at the same time during flu season. The confusion over the symptoms as well the cross-species nature of H1N1 absolutely played a role in its media hyped portrayal. Soon after, common disease narratives of blaming the (racialized) Other would appear shortly and gain national attention. However, this type of story telling would obscure what Professor Matthew Sparke calls H1N1 as " unforeseen consequences of the global interconnectedness established by globalization." We will explore this particular quote in further detail in later sections. 

Discussion questions

  1. When analyzing the NPR animation, what are its strengths in communicating scientific knowledge into accessible material? What are its weaknesses?
  2. When looking at the NPR video and the video about H1N1, how do they both compare with one another? Specifically, how do they supplement one another? What if the H1N1 video was the first video you saw? How would it impact the understanding?
  3. Matthew Sparke called H1N1 as "unforeseen consequences of the global interconnectedness established by globalization" while Rob Wallace identified H1N1 as a disease that had genes from other organisms like humans, swine, and birds. How might these two points be related here? 

Additional Resources

CDC Documentation: http://www.cdc.gov/h1n1flu/cdcresponse.htm

Works Cited

Doucleff, Michaeleen. "What's In A Flu Name? H's And N's Tell A Tale." NPR. NPR, 7 May 2013. Web. 13
July 2013. <http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/05/07/180808276/whats-in-a-flu-name-hs-and-ns-tell-a-tale>.

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