Vietnam Safe from Swine Flu
Swine flu is big news at the moment and reading postings on travel forums such as TripAdvisor it seems some people are refusing to travel altogether, even to safe destinations such as Vietnam. Here’s a posting from TripAdvisor this morning:
We have decided not to travel to Vietnam just now and will be going closer to home to Kota kinabalu,my.We will wait till all this flu is well and truely over before venturing too far from home.Still looking forward to Vietnam though.There’s always next year.
Isn’t this strange? Why should Kota Kinabalu be seen as safer than Vietnam? It seems that when the media hype up a disease, people panic and begin thinking illogically. In reality, Vietnam is one of the many countries not to have had a single case of swine flu, and its recent experience in dealing with SARS and avian flu means it is better equipped than most when it comes to taking precautions against such pandemics.
Which brings us back to the subject of the media. In 2004, at the height of the bird flu scare, I wrote this letter to UK newspaper The Observer after it published a scaremongering article about bird flu in Vietnam:
Dear Sirs
I was amused to read the following in the News section of this week’s Escape:
“Recent outbreaks of SARS and bird flu in the Far East have shown that even relatively small outbreaks can have a great impact on countries’ economies and the travel industry”.
This is undoubtedly true, but only because these small outbreaks, which offer virtually zero threat to tourists, are blown up out of all proportion by irresponsible, scaremongering newspapers such as yours, with no concern about the devastating effects such misleading journalism has on the countries concerned.
I was living in Vietnam at the time of the SARS outbreak and working for a tour operator. We lost 90% of our spring business as a result of scare stories about the disease, even though the only way a foreign tourist could have caught SARS would have been to breach the watertight security surrounding the one (yes, one) Hanoi hospital which housed the forty-three (yes, only forty-three) Vietnamese SARS cases, and get into bed with one of them. To contract bird flu, this same tourist would have to achieve a similar degree of intimacy with a chicken.
Despite this non-existent risk, thousands of jobs were lost and livelihoods ruined in a country whose economy relies on tourism, all thanks to newspapers like the Observer misleading ill-informed, gullible travellers. I hope you are very proud of yourselves.
Tim Russell
History is now repeating itself with swine flu. Despite the Mexican government now saying that the outbreak is far less serious than first feared, despite doctors advising that it is still safe to travel, and despite US medical experts stating that the disease is far less potent than initial reports suggested, the media are still pressing the panic button. Why? Nothing else to write about? Boosting the domestic economy by encouraging panic buying and discouraging travel? Whatever the reason, “SWINE FLU PANIC!” is a more exciting story than “a few hundred people a bit ill, but nothing to worry about.” And who cares about the effect on developing economies for whom tourism is a major source of income.
So in the words of the mighty Public Enemy, don’t believe the hype! If you’ve already booked your trip to southeast Asia, don’t cancel. And if you want to go somewhere safe, come to Vietnam!
