6705: Swine Flu And Racist Pigs.

From The New York Times…

Symptoms of Ignorance and Bigotry

By Jim Dwyer

The world is full of side effects. Earlier this week, a student arrived for a class on Photoshop at a social services center for Mexican immigrants inside an old church rectory.

“One of the students, a restaurant worker, said his boss told him, ‘I’m going to hire some other workers, please tell your people and friends to apply and come in for an interview,’ ” said Joel Magallan, the director of the center, Asociación Tepeyac de New York, on West 14th Street in Manhattan.

“Then the owner said, ‘Please, don’t bring Mexicans, because they could have the swine flu.’”

So far this year, about 13,000 people have died from ordinary, garden-variety flu in the United States, about four people every hour, every day. There was not a recorded peep from Joseph R. Biden Jr., the vice president, about this.

Then one person, a toddler in Texas, was reported to have died from swine flu. Mr. Biden went on television and said he’d advise his own family to stay off airplanes and subways. Later, the White House team in charge of pulling the vice president’s foot out of his mouth issued a statement saying that what he really meant was that the people who should stay off airplanes and subways were those suffering from swine flu.

More people die of loneliness or lard. More people died in a few minutes when a man went berserk in Binghamton, N.Y., last month. Since August, there have been 14 deaths by gun in schools in the United States.

The difference with swine flu, of course, is not simply foolish remarks by the vice president. When seasonal influenza is lethal, it is usually older people who die, or those in poor health. But in Mexico, swine flu apparently killed young people.

Just because one problem may turn out to be less dangerous than others — so far, no more than 25 people are confirmed as having died in Mexico from the swine flu, compared with more than 6,000 killed by drug violence in that country last year — does not undercut the genius of modern public health surveillance, which quickly recognizes changes in the course of an illness.

This important news has been quickly outpaced by alarm that has traveled faster than the virus, and sprinted well ahead of the known facts. The gaps in information are spackled with guesses, ignorance, even bigotry.

“I’ve been hearing all week at college: Stay away from the Mexican restaurants,” said Jocelyn Ponce, 18, who is in her first year at Baruch College. “Friends are telling me to be careful about those kinds of places.”

As Ms. Ponce spoke, she stood a few feet from a machine that is practically the foundation of Mexican restaurants around New York: the tortilla line at the Tortilleria Chinantla on Grand Street in Brooklyn.

The tortillas glide down the conveyor, six at a time, spilling into a basket. About a million a day come down the line. A machine stacks them. Then they are packed into plastic bags by four workers clad in hairnets and uniforms. One of them, Sandra Maceda, pressed the air out of the bags with the palm of her hand, then tied a red band at the top and loaded them into cardboard cases.

“Yes, I do think the flu is a big problem,” she said, speaking as her hands never stopped working the bags of tortillas.

Ms. Maceda, who is from Puebla, Mexico, has been following the news from home with anxiety. The Mexican economy has been frozen by the shutdown of businesses and schools.

In 1976, a young soldier died of an earlier version of swine flu; the United States launched a mass vaccination program that, some experts say, ultimately killed more people than the disease itself. In 2002, Dick Cheney, then vice president, urged that the entire country be vaccinated against smallpox, a disease that has effectively been eradicated from the world. Mr. Cheney argued that Iraq might have the ability to use a weaponized version of the smallpox pathogen to attack the United States. The side effects from a smallpox vaccination program, public health officials said, would probably have included several hundred deaths and thousands of serious illnesses. And, as it turned out, Iraq did not have any smallpox or any other biological weapons.

Before the news about the emergence of the new swine flu strain, Ms. Maceda said, her top worries were “immigration, schools for the kid, my job. And the security of the subways — the service cuts here, and the big fare increase.”

Not quite what Joe Biden had in mind.