flickering pictures

So the posting here has been a little slow for the last week or so — mainly because the rest of my life has been anything but. I’ve got reams of work to plow through and don’t even really have time to be posting right now, but this story was exactly the kind of odd that I love to go on about here. And hey, I skipped lunch.

Pigs, as you likely know, are considered unclean or even offensive by most of the Muslim and Jewish world — as evidenced by the recent Israeli objections to the term “swine flu.” Israel’s deputy health minister even argued that “we should call this Mexican flu and not swine flu,” because somehow pinning an infectious disease on Mexico and its 110,000,000 citizens is less offensive than blaming the pigs.

But that’s another story entirely. This one’s not about pigs in general, but about one in particular — a boar, actually — who was gifted to Kabul’s ramshackle zoo from China along with lions, bears, peacocks, deer and a wolf, in order to help revitalize the place back in 2002. The problem is, it’s against the law to own a pig or pork product in Afghanistan. At the same time, rejecting or discarding a state gift is a major diplomatic faux-pas, and fragile Afghanistan is in no position to be insulting superpowers.

The solution: the pig would eke out a solitary existence in his pen at the zoo, shunned by the population but allowed to live out his natural years in relative peace. Then swine flu came along and scared the pants off of everyone.

In response, the Guardian reports that the zoo placed the pig in quarantine, locking him in a sealed-off back room. The zoo admitted that the odds of Afghanistan’s lone hog having swine flu were exactly zero, but zoogoers were apparently freaking out just the same, and scaring your customers is bad business.

Despite the poor pig’s state — isolated but otherwise well — the Guardian article reports that he’s actually getting off easy, in comparison to some of his cousins elsewhere:

At the weekend health officials in Baghdad said three wild boars at the city’s zoo had been destroyed because of fears about flu. Egypt, meanwhile, has ordered the slaughter of the estimated 250,000 pigs inside the country, eaten by the country’s Christian minority, even though the World Health Organisation stresses that the virus cannot be passed on through properly cooked meat.

Incidentally, in the 39 days since this swine flu outbreak was discovered, it has killed exactly 44 people, and turning on the news you’d think the four horsemen of the apocalypse were galloping down from the heavens. In those same 39 days:*

• 3,419 Americans died of the plain old regular flu, 2,243 more were killed by radon-related lung cancer, and another 20,836 were killed by medical screw-ups.
• 64,000 people died of typhoid.
• 21,370 people were killed by schistosomiasis, a disease caused by aquatic parasites.
• 64,000 children died of diarrhea — in India alone. That number is so huge that I didn’t believe it until I’d checked several different sites. 1,643 more will die tomorrow.

*(extrapolated from annual figures)

I don’t want to belittle the suffering this disease is causing, but I do want to put it in perspective. The cities of Los Angeles, Dallas and Detroit have a combined population of just over 6 million people. That’s also the number of Indian children under 5 who will die of simple diarrhea in the next 10 years. Barring a killer mutation, the swine flu death toll looks like it’ll be pretty insignificant compared to that.

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