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...make sense of the situation, some people needed a villain. Bloggers accused pharmaceutical companies of intentionally concocting the virus in order to sell vaccines. On one website, conspiracy theorists researched public records about the Henshaws and deduced that they were actually victims of radiation poisoning - possibly from a dirty bomb smuggled in through Mexico. As things turned out, Hayden's school reopened about a week later. To make up for the lost time, school officials canceled final exams. With that, Hayden's classmates found it in their hearts to forgive him. The summer brought a new consensus about H1N1...
...asterisks help explain why, in October, the government will ask more of the public. The CDC, along with state and local health officials, will launch the most ambitious mass-vaccination campaign in U.S. history. This will be a new vaccine since the regular vaccine for seasonal flu will offer no protection against H1N1. But because it is being produced exactly like the seasonal-flu vaccine that manufacturers make every year, it is relatively predictable. It will have been studied in clinical trials, which are going on now, and so far, it appears that the risks of serious side effects...
...June the CDC organized 15 focus groups in three cities to discuss the public's impressions of the new flu so far. The participants had all heard of the virus, but they had a lot of questions. In an Atlanta group, the organizers had people read a news story about a real-life, healthy teenage girl from Milwaukee who had caught H1N1 in the spring and died. The group reacted with intense discomfort and then did what humans do: they looked for a way to fit it into one of the boxes in their mind. Some speculated that the girl...
Will We Tune Out? So what is the most sensible way for us to calibrate the risks posed by H1N1? This summer, public-health authorities have worried almost as much about people's risk-benefit equation as they have about the virus. Dr. Karen Remley, health commissioner for Virginia, has noticed that most people seem to fall into one of two categories when it comes to H1N1. "There's a group of people who think it's all gone and over," she says. "There's a group who say, 'Armageddon is going to happen!' The trick is getting people...
...nation's most informed public-health experts do not share their best guesses, people will find worse information somewhere else. "People cannot make rational decisions without knowledge," says Dr. Sandro Galea, director of the Center for Global Health at the University of Michigan. "And knowledge has to flow centrally. Absent that, you will have a flow of mythologies...