Less talk, less spreading of fear, more action

Those who dismiss all the cries of imminent danger, be it from a pandemic or global warming, ought to examine what’s going on in the province today as a mumps outbreak spreads.

Mumps?

Yes, mumps.

What does that have to do with all the cries of doom coming our way from bird flu, pandemics and the melting of the polar ice caps?

A lot.

Especially if you’ve noticed how this whole mumps thing has been handled.

Students at Dalhousie University in Halifax were the first to be hit with mumps. And despite the plea from health officials for the stricken to stay away from others, the disease spread, as anyone familiar with Dalhousie’s huge student base would,we’d think, expect.

Dalhousie has a student population in the thousands and is a sprawling campus in this province’s capital city. That population comes from around the world. That campus is, in effect, a microcosm of the bigger world.

And despite the attempt to have the first students stricken with mumps removed from the general population the disease has spread. For the past few weeks now we have been reporting about local suspected cases of mumps. No doubt the time will come when we will soon hear of health-care workers being off the job because of their exposure to the people with the disease. And in this province that already sees some hospitals shutting down their emergency departments because of a lack of personnel we can hardly afford to have more people in the health field off work.

Mumps, it has been said, are spreading because students from Dal are now heading home. Home, as we said, being just about everywhere.

The mumps are breaking out across Canada now with some four provinces already reporting cases.

And, no doubt, as the people exposed to mumps at Dal spread out around the globe there will be many more cases of mumps.

Apparently people in a specific age group (late teens, early 20s) did not receive the two doses of vaccine authorities now feel are necessary to ward off mumps. Today we are seeing the result of that failure. And authorities are now considering giving those people the second vaccine. Thje obvious question is why didn’t someone start doing that when it first became apparent that there were people out there who had only received one dose?

What we are also seeing should cause lots of alarm in the general population as we get bombarded every day with talk of the pending pandemic and other disasters.

If the system cannot put in place procedures that ensure things like mumps on a university campus are contained, what faith should we have in the system’s abilility to properly handle something far more serious like a bird flu epidemic or a pandemic? Let alone global warming.

As is always the case in these situations what we expect is a lot of costly, time-consuming meetings short on common sense and high on talk after the fact. And maybe a report on what was done, what could have been done and what should be done the next time around.

The problem is that we are running out of opportunities to tackle more serious problems if we see things like mumps and how we handle that as a training ground for the next problem.

Perhaps the folks sending out all the warnings about the things they feel we all ought to worry about already realize they’re ill-equipped to handle them and that’s why they’re telling everyone to brace for what they fear is coming.