Blogger Back
I'm back from holiday in the Wild Coast, to a seeming firestorm about avian flu. It's always interesting being out of the news loop for almost two weeks, and return to a media storm about a particular subject. Given the number of infections (mostly in birds not humans), it's interesting to me whether this current media storm is a media driven phenomenon. I.e. is this media alone getting caught up in a feeding frenzy where the prevalence of the story in competing media vehicles drives the importance of the story itself, rather than its actual newsworthiness or credibility. Whilst I have no doubt about the seriousness of the potential epidemic should the avian flu mutate to be able to pass from human to human, there seems to be little new news about the disease in the newspapers, merely lines and lines of quotes from various 'experts' who all seem to be saying the same old thing.