Perspective valuable as news of flu goes viral

The latest variant of the flu is here, leaving its calling card in illness, anxiety and alarm. Since I've lived more than a few decades, most of it doing or studying journalism, I can see that these periodic epidemics have been important parts of our lives.

In the past few weeks, influenza news itself has become viral, available across the thousands of news sources waiting at the touch of a key.

Influenza first touched me in the fall of 1957, when the Asian flu pandemic hit the University of Washington, where I was a sophomore journalism student.

I didn't get the flu in 1957, but I recall that a friend in my dormitory was sent to the infirmary for several days for treatment and recovery. Guest rooms in my dormitory were used to isolate and treat other students with the flu. Yet, campus life for a novice journalist was way too distracting to obsess about the flu.

Identified in the early months of 1957, flu reached the city and campus that summer.

The UW campus newspaper, The Daily, paid almost no attention to the 1957 epidemic.

The Daily did not mention it until the first day of the fall term, when it reported that immunizations were available for $1 and said that 5 percent of fraternity members had been ill, compared with 15 percent of those in sororities. Seattle residents living in dorms or Greek houses were urged to live at home for a few weeks.

Houses with outdoor porch bunk beds, the university said, should set bunks at least 3 feet apart. "Head and feet of bunks should be alternated," The Daily reported.

Two days into the fall term, The Daily reported "Asiatic flu on Decline," and the subject disappeared from its pages.

The flu at a pandemic level returned to Seattle in 1968, and realizing it had missed me in 1957, put me in bed for a week. The only good memory I have of my suffering was that I didn't feel the symptoms until two hours after I had completed my last graduate-school examination before the winter break. I don't remember that I was even aware that my muscle aches made me a participant in a pandemic.

After all, 1968 was not a slow news year.

These experiences always have been tempered by the knowledge that my mother's best friend died during the Spanish flu pandemic after World War I. Her stories about a sad time at Whitman College in Walla Walla also shape how I respond to these scourges.

Today's swine-flu news is cause neither for panic nor indifference. The ability to identify and track a dangerous virus has grown steadily in the past century. Information resources enable most of us to keep abreast of what is known by the world's health agencies, far better than we could in 1918, 1957 or 1968.

At the same time, let's realize that the current state of news distribution spreads all manner of good and bad information widely. No wonder some of us are unsettled.

It's worth remembering that life always has been fragile, the flu can be virulent, and so can the storm of information about it exploding around us. When the "flu news" epidemic leaves us worried and confused, past experience suggests that we can put things back in balance by paying attention and respect to all the rest of what makes up our complex lives.

Roger Simpson is the Dart Professor of Journalism and Trauma at the University of Washington Department of Communication.