It is outside the scope of this blog to write about swine flu. I know a serious pandemic would have a great effect on running and that races and group runs would be cancelled. But the effect on running would be meaninglessly trivial compared to everything else, when all of our efforts would be concentrated on just trying to keep going.
That is why I am impressed by the efforts of the WHO and various governments to try to contain or minimise the effects of the disease. It is important they are monitoring the situation and have plans of action and that what they are doing is based on scientific work. It is not the overreaction of self-serving bureaucracies, as is asserted in this very depressing article by
Simon Jenkins.
Some of the endless speculation in the media might be a little hysterical but that is another matter. Their difficulty is that although there is a very clear risk of a serious event we do not as yet know what will happen. If we are lucky it will fizzle out into nothing but at the moment we do not know enough to make accurate predications and so we have to wait and watch and evaluate - the very things our 24 hour rolling news culture is ill equipped to do.
But there are good sources of information. There have been considered reports in the broadsheets and interesting programmes on the radio. However, for the first time, I am using a blog as my main source of information on a major story.
Effect Measure is written by senior public health scientist in America - let me recommend it to you
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