Dread: How Fear and Fantasy Have Fueled Epidemics from the Black Death to Avian Flu, by Philip Alcabes
Each year far fewer people die in epidemics than in automobile accidents. But if you worry more about the H1N1 virus than the highway, you are not alone. Throughout human history people have held deep-seated anxieties about disease and epidemics. How they choose to respond to those threats can tell you a lot about a society and its culture.
Philip Alcabes is an epidemiologist and associate professor of Urban Public Health at the City University of New York. His new book “Dread: How Fear and Fantasy Have Fueled Epidemics from the Black Death to Avian Flu” describes how, in the developed world, we are more inflamed by fear than by actual disease. Epidemics scare us because in addition to our fear of germs and illness they also prey upon our fear of social disruption. They make us worry that something fundamental is going to happen that will change everything and life as we know it isn’t going to go on.
In ancient times, people believed that physical ailments were inseparable from spiritual sickness. For example, there are passages in the bible where plagues are sent by God to punish sinners. To that way of thinking, if you were ill it was because you were a bad person and you deserved your fate. By the time of the Renaissance, people began to learn that outbreaks of illness stemmed from a physical cause, even if efforts to identify those causes were not always very successful.
Medical advances in the twentieth century resulted in the eradication of many illnesses. But despite everything, some people still associate disease with behaviour and believe that afflicted individuals have done something wrong. AIDS is just one example of a disease that has been subject to that type of negative and blameworthy approach.
Alcabes believes that the media fuels our fears of social disruption and sickness. Self-proclaimed experts define new diseases and identify new threats such as the obesity epidemic and the ADHD epidemic, neither of which actually fit the true definition of an epidemic. As a society, we have access to so much information that we can find out what’s happening anywhere in the world. That could be reassuring if we wanted it to be, but it’s very easy to use the wealth of information that’s available to validate our worst fears.
What’s the solution? Alcabes points out that what we think is likely to happen almost never does. TB’s resurgence turned out to be a blip and while West Nile and SARS were responsible for some deaths neither turned out to be the new plague. In the face of such uncertainty, the best course of action is to remain skeptical and ask questions about who benefits by forecasting the next global threat.
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