farmdoc's blog post number 449

I’ve previously written of ‘disease mongering’ – i.e. the creation of medical ‘diseases’ for commercial gain, aka the medicalisation of the human condition. In a letter in the May Internal Medicine Journal, disease mongering’s described as a ‘tripodal monster’ whose three legs are the drug companies, people eager to be patients, and doctors eager to be deities. The letter recommends any would-be doctor deity to link up with a politician to maximise publicity and thus influence. One of my nephews has swine flu. Because it’s a real disease, swine flu’s not a classic mongered disease. But it’s a cousin. Promotion of swine flu increases the demand for anti-viral drugs (Relenza and Tamiflu) and thus the profits of their makers; it turns public health doctors into media deities; and it allows politicians media coverage to issue forth on a topic they know little about, giving them a false aura of importance and competence. Swine flu is a pandemic, but geographic extent isn’t correlated with severity. This Google site shows that the number of flu cases in Australia this season’s no greater than in prior years. And I’ll bet you anything the number of flu deaths this year’s no higher either. Yet the media attention given to swine flu’s preposterous; and it frightens a public that has little or no grasp of what’s going on. In short, I think swine flu’s a beat up. But all this is not to diminish your illness, Ro. I hope you recover soon, mate.

farmdoc's blog post number 418

Google. I’m surprised the word appears in only 10 of the previous 417 Farmdoc’s Blog posts. For subjectively Google seems much more pervasive in my cyber life. Eight days ago I added this comment to blog post 210: ‘On 4 June 2009 Google launched its flu trend web page for Australia. Here is the article and here is the direct link’. Seems like a good thing. As does RabbitScan which uses Google Earth to provide evidence-based mapping of rabbit location and prevalence. This mapping’s intended to stimulate governments to develop and implement new rabbit control measures, now that resistance has developed to Calicivirus that was released in 1995, and rabbit numbers are growing again. RabbitScan’s founder, NSW grazier David Lord, said this use of Google Maps is being watched as a potential model for mapping other pests, and also weeds and wildlife. RabbitScan’s mapping campaign’s due to end in December. I’ve joined it. And as I did so I pondered Google – what I think of it, and my relationship with it. In a word, my relationship’s ambivalent. Whilst doing good and helping people, Google’s simultaneously getting bigger and more powerful. And more pervasive. I don’t know if my awareness of this will help. But it won’t hurt. And judging by this article in last Tuesday’s Age, I’m not alone in my circumspection.

farmdoc's blog post number 210

I’m not a religious man in the conventional observant sense. But I am spiritual. For example, as I’ve written, whenever I visit Cradle Mountain I feel the presence of something I can’t explain, but seemingly a strong preternatural force. Two days ago, when darling Emily, Jono and I walked up to Marion’s lookout and then around Dove Lake, I felt it again, even though apart from brief glimpses The Mountain was shrouded in cloud and mist. I have a theory that each person has a hardwired affinity to mountain vistas or sea vistas, but not to both equally. If so then I’m unequivocally in the former group. But I digress. Because what I want to say is that there are some man-made creations that evoke awe in me, albeit not with any sense of spirituality. Here are two, and they’re related to one another: The Google search engine never fails to impress and excite me. Searching the entire World Wide Web in a fraction of a second is astounding, astonishing, dumbfounding. And patterns in Google search queries can be very informative. Last year a Google team began to explore if search queries could accurately model real-world phenomena. Last Tuesday Google launched Google Flu Trends which to date accurately mirrors true data (for the USA). Amazing. But nowhere near as amazing as Cradle Mountain.