The swine flu has finally reached Egypt. At the same time it has also elevated in status to a pandemic. I hadn’t been paying much attention, probably because it wasn’t here and I make it a point not to delve into things that are not in my ‘immediate’ world. Partially because I do not trust the media to give us accurate information so I try to deal with what is real or experienced.

When it was discovered here in Egypt everyone panic. The AUC dorms were closed and quarantined. The university closed. Each day more and more cases, mainly in the dorms. Which makes sense since everyone was locked in there together! Then the pandemic announcement came with rumors of airports closing, passengers being quarantined on arrival, restaurants closing…I think pandemic should just be called ‘panic’.

Perhaps that is it’s only function, to keep us in fear, because when you go and examine the actual information that is available on ‘swine flu’ aka H1N1 it is classified as a ‘moderate’ flu, like a seasonal flu. We need to keep in perspective that this is not Ebola or Meningitis, it is a flu. People are dying, but people die from the flu every year. Up to 36,000 just in the US die from the seasonal flu every year.

When the flu changed status and became a pandemic people assumed that the virus had become more severe. But that is not what the status change meant. It merely meant that it had crossed significant geographic borders. It had more to do with the distance it had spread not that it was more dangerous. In order to realize what is really happening one has to look closely and most people are too afraid to do that.

The big news is that pharmaceutical companies are being paid billions of dollars to find a vaccine. Seems someone is benefiting, which alone is sad. Especially since this is not an especially dangerous disease. It is a very contagious disease. (For more information on symptoms and management of the disease go to www.cdc.gov/h1n1flu/qa.htm).

Barbara Hand Clow predicted that healing would replace money as the new ‘currency’. I guess we are beginning to understand how that might be true. If a person does not have their health then everything else is really worthless. This pandemic falling right on the heels of the financial crash seems serendipitous. We are first shown the illusion that we have been living in and then we are given a wake up call about what is really real. Our bodies! Not only do we need a sustainable economy we need a sustainable life style one that promotes good health.

Vaccines and medications are just like loans from banks, the pharmaceutical companies being the new ‘banks’. This gives us a false sense of wellbeing. All we are doing is postponing the inevitable, we are not fixing anything. We are taking credit against our health.

We need to move to a more curative mentality. I wrote in an earlier post about ‘cancer’ mentality and how it is a need for constant growth. Constant growth is cancer. When I mentioned it I was talking about the economy. I was suggesting that we need to shift our thinking from growth economy to sustainable economy in order not to devour ourselves.

Perhaps this shift needs to include how we think about life and health, to work to create a sustainable life style on all levels of existence. And just as we need to stop giving away our economic power to institutions and financial ‘experts’ we need to take back control of our health, to take that out of the hands of institutions and experts as well.