'Swallowing our skepticism along with our Tamiflu'

From Typhoid Mary's journal of the plague week :

Believe me, I was as bored and blasé as you about this pig flu thing until the moment a nurse stickered my son's name on to a pack of Tamiflu. And then the opinions rained down. “I hope you're not going to give him that!” railed a homeopath friend, e-mailing me links to scary websites citing the immunity-nuking properties of antivirals and the satanic intent of the Roche corporation.

The morning after we collected our yellow and white capsules from the crash team of Health Protection Agency medics assembled at Alleyn's, my elder son's school in South London, I was still prevaricating. The five pig flu cases weren't in his class or even his year. The children's malaise was not so bad that they couldn't chat to national newspapers.

The drug is heavy, with nasty side-effects. The boy was healthy, rudely so, bouncing around the house, dripping teabags and leaving tops off my pens, celebrating his school's closure by driving me mad. Was this all an arse-covering exercise, litigation-avoidance, a monumental health and safety overreaction?

So I rang a fellow parent, a sane and calm woman, who said that, of course, her daughter was taking her meds adding, politely but firmly, that if my son wasn't, she'd rather they didn't meet. Who wants to be Typhoid Mary, a pariah responsible for a widening outbreak, cursed by one's peers not just for spreading pig pestilence, but messing up their childcare plans. It is a rare moment in our atomised lives when a small private act is freighted with such social responsibility. So my son swallowed his Tamiflu and I my scepticism.

But I know plenty who haven't: doctor-parents who didn't even bother to collect the drug, others who did but are sitting on it, keeping schtum to avoid a collective guilt trip. The trouble with this South London outbreak is that the agents of contagion are not rats or Chinese chickens or some imagined, pox-ridden underclass but children with names like Hannah and Felix, born to parents wealthy enough, not merely to pay private school fees, but afford long-haul Easter jaunts to Florida and Cancún.

And those they are likely to infect are educated, questioning and self-confident, uneasy about being bounced into action by the State in its blue-flashing emergency mode. Maybe governments can no longer rely upon unthinking deference to doctors that has hitherto ensured compliance in national heath crises. Public medicine has to take on the anti-MMR autism army, the holistic hypochondriacs, health page readers, toxin dodgers and pharma-conspiracy theorists. “What if,” one parent said, “Tamiflu turns out to be the new thalidomide? It's a new drug, how can we be sure?”

Two sides line up glaring at each other - those with utter faith in modern medicine, the others only suspicion. And the rest of us caught in the middle cannot help but feel a tad patronised by government leaflets ordering us to cover our mouth when we cough and balk at having the President of the United States take to YouTube to tell us to wash our hands after making pee-pee. The numbers now breaking out the anti-bacterial hand gel are only equalled by those who believe there is no better innoculant than eating a peck of dirt. I made the concession to public health, for the first time in eons, of changing the hand towel in the downstairs loo.

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