Censorship Doesn’t Just Stifle Speech – It Can Spread Disease

http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/08/ap_mers/

by Blahah • 13 years ago

149 16 13 years ago

JonSkeptic• 13 years ago

Some would argue the desire to censor is a disease of the mind. Or perhaps, a symptom of a mind plagued by fear of the unknown and shaken by the threat of new information.

djf1• 13 years ago

I would argue that the desire to censor is the result of its effectiveness in maintaining existing power structures.

seiji• 13 years ago

I must not fear.

Fear is the mind-killer.

Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.

bausson• 13 years ago

I never thought of censorship from that perspective.

It is refreshing, since 90% of the links I come by here about censorship are either about privacy, privacy expectation and influence on economy.

That way, nobody can say "I've done nothing wrong, so I'm not concerned".

koshatnik• 13 years ago

This is very like what happens in the book World War Z, which was probably inspired by government responses to SARS and other epidemics. A mysterious disease arises in China, and the government strongly censors reporting of outbreaks. This and other factors (people smuggling, illegal organ trade) contribute to its spread worldwide, and it is only when it cannot be contained that the world is aware and can start to understand and fight it.

sukuriant2• 13 years ago

As downvote-prone as that comment seems like it could be, I would like to add it it by saying that this can't be the right way to handle diseases. There has to be a sweet spot between telling everyone immediately, insighting a panic, and holding back all of the information.

I'm not too incredibly concerned with managing the information from the general public; but, the WHO and other people should always be immediately informed. In fact, if they were rapidly informed and we can get a cure out quickly, then the loss of life from these new diseases wouldn't be as bad, I would like to hope.

The problem is in hiding the information.

mark-r• 13 years ago

There's a problem with "getting a cure out quickly". For most diseases that's simply impossible - is there a cure for SARS yet? The best you can do is slow down the spread. If you detect it quickly enough hopefully you'll stop it.

coldtea• 13 years ago

There has to be a sweet spot between telling everyone immediately, insighting a panic, and holding back all of the information.

What if there's panic? It's not with a, say, earthquake prediction, where people would evacuate cities etc.

Rather, they'd stay at home more, avoid crowded places, avoid people looking sick, and wear those white mouth/nose masks more when out -- in all, that should help reduce the spreading of the dicease.

icambron2• 13 years ago

There has to be a sweet spot between telling everyone immediately, inciting a panic

I disagree. Perfect transparency is always the right way to go with epidemic diseases. That information will go through all kinds of natural filters: scientific journalists who can dispense useful advice, foreign governments that can refer to quarantine policies, and every day people who can make tradeoffs about the risks they're willing to face. Far worse is having a bunch of seemingly arbitrary restrictions imposed because of--in the minds of citizenry--some vague but clearly terrifying disease is killing people, but about which the populace has no useful information.

Cures don't really come out quickly, or even vaccines. The main way you stop a disease by preventing its spread, not curing it. So what ideally comes out quickly is guidelines and simple preventative measures. Watch for these signs and report them. Don't spend time around people coughing. Wear a mask. Etc. And people have to know that stuff if they're going to be part of the solution, not to mention the everyday medical professionals at your local hospital (with no connection to the WHO) who need to know who to isolate and what preventative measures to take. And of course they need to know how bad it is in order to prioritize it relative to other concerns. Concealing from people what's happening makes all of that harder.

We saw with SARS in the West that epidemics can be overblown, but there wasn't widespread panic and the widespread availability of information allowed people to choose how much to guard against it. I'd go so far as to say it's your right to overreact to accurate information. And in the end, it wasn't some magic cure that stopped SARS; it's was fast response and quarantine.

Anything other than complete transparency about public health issues is immoral.

nitrogen• 13 years ago

Long term, I think the goal should be to improve the general public's response to information to the point where it's okay if everyone knows right away because they won't be stupid about it.

ginko• 13 years ago

What isn't really apparent to me from this article is WHY Saudi Arabia, or China for that matter, would even want to censor this.

cnorgate• 13 years ago

It's a prisoner's dilemma. All countries are better off if everyone shares information, but there is a huge incentive to 'cheat' in this agreement.

News of an outbreak in a given country will have a substantial, negative economic impact. At the very least, tourism and trade will suffer. It's not unreasonable that other countries will quarantine and outright block off ties with the affected country.

Back in 2003 with SARS, Toronto Canada took a substantial hit in tourism dollars, so much so that the Rolling Stones stepped in to host a charity concert to help the city out... Chinese tourism was likely affected worse.

As a politician or public health official, crying wolf early or raising the alarm of a potential outbreak will certainly have a negative financial impact... what's not known is how serious a given outbreak might be. So in short, they are weighing a known, substantial cost (lost tourism) against an unknown and unquantifiable benefit (avoiding an outbreak)... being the political worms they are that got them into office in the first place, they will most likely take the route that provides the least direct blow-back to them, which is sadly the route of hiding the outbreak.

jpatokal• 13 years ago

Because if it leaks out that they have a new, lethal, incurable and contagious disease, they'll be treated like they have the plague. (See where the metaphor comes from?)

I moved to Singapore in 2003, when the SARS epidemic was raging. (IIRC, the last death in Singapore was the day I arrived.) People back home thought I was crazy, the usually crowded city-state's streets were rattlingly empty, restaurants had desperately promotions ($1/plate sushi etc) and the five-star hotel I'd been booked into at an already low rate bumped me to an apartment suite.

Of course, I was far more at risk of dying in a traffic accident, but "plague!" is one of those risk factors like "terrorism!" that makes people's hindbrains gibber in fear and discount all rational risk analysis.

icambron2• 13 years ago

The risk for SARS was massively overblown, but, unlike terrorism, entire populations really have been decimated by plagues.

noonespecial• 13 years ago

If you construct the machinery of censorship, it will be misused for bad things that never even crossed your mind.

Censorship Doesn’t Just Stifle Speech – It Can Spread Disease

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