Swine Flu Redux

There was concern about significant worldwide infection and death shortly after the swine flu was discovered in Mexico earlier this year. That concern tailed off as it because clear, perhaps prematurely so, the strain was infecting many people but killing few. Even predictions that one-third of the world’s population might come down with the disease were not so frightening if the disease was rarely fatal.

The pendulum of swine flu concern is now swinging back toward panic.

A United Nation’s report leaked to the Guardian says that the flu could kill millions of people in the world’s poorest nations and cause political anarchy in some of them. The document calls for rich nations to put 900 million pounds toward buying vaccines for these regions. That does not seem like a lot of money but the “rich” nations mentioned are usually facing tremendous budget deficits.

The news will spark concern about both human suffering and the role that poor countries play in the global economy. While some of these nations are consumers of imports from larger nations like China and the US, their GDPs are typically too small to make this terribly meaningful. That leaves the problem of what some of these nations export. Many of these poor nations are major producers of commodities, especially metals and crude. Deadly epidemics could cause interruptions of those supplies triggering another slowdown in the world economy or commodities-based inflation.

The threat of a pandemic among poor nations raises the threat of a pandemic in richer countries. The swine flu’s spread is not confined by borders. The specter of tens of thousands of hospital beds in the US and Europe filled with victims and the disruption to productivity is being raised as an issue, again. The effects of the disease could still be economically insignificant, but it looks less and less like that as each day passes.

Douglas A. McIntyre