From JSTOR:
Plagues are a staple of modern day popular culture. There’s the actual news cycles dominated by the disease du jour—Ebola, H1N1, SARS. Then there’s an entire genre of film based on mysterious bugs that wipe out populations, or turn people into the murderous undead. A popular online game, Pandemic, has you deliberately infecting as many countries as possible.
You would think that our fascination with epidemics might be a natural human reaction to a threat, and yet, our specific fear of certain diseases has little to do with their actual degree of deadliness. We pay much less attention to hypertension, respiratory diseases, and diabetes, which according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are among the deadliest conditions in the United States.
Scholar Nancy Tomes set out to interrogate what exactly makes an illness newsworthy. She writes that although “historians and literary critics have produced many useful studies of individual diseases, they have only rarely explored the larger process of competition for attention that operated in making one disease seem a more compelling subject than another.”
Tomes revisited the literature and culture of the early twentieth century, interrogating past patterns of mortality and press coverage to determine what factors might contribute to the public’s fervor around a particular disease. What she found was a complex interplay of factors: political agendas, scientific advancement, and media interest fueled fear more than a straightforward correlation between “danger” and “publicity.”
From “parrot fever” (a respiratory infection caused by an avian-borne strain of chlamydia) to “undulant fever” (also known as brucellosis, caused by a bacteria in raw milk), Tomes investigates what diseases were seen as newsworthy, which were best suited to plays and entertainment that captured the public’s imagination, and which could be safely designated to “the other” and therefore titillate as well as deepen social divides for political reasons. None of these on their own create a public pandemic panic—but together, they’re a powerful vehicle that can distract us from what’s really dangerous.
. . . .
For example, we are familiar with tuberculosis from its prominent place in the art and culture of the early twentieth century. Given its prevalence in popular culture, we may assume it was decimating populations. According to Tomes, however, T.B.’s notoriety is not a fully accurate representation of the peril it caused. While indeed a fatal and contagious disease, other equally terrible afflictions may not have been awarded the same level of attention. Sexually transmitted diseases, for example, were on the rise and taking a toll on the population at the time, but were not seen as fit for public discussion.
“T.B. became the ‘master disease’ of early-twentieth-century reformers and editors not because it was on the rise but because it served other compelling agendas,” writes Tomes. It bolstered the then-new germ theory of disease. Although it hadn’t previously been considered a communicable disease, when the medical profession proved its contagious nature, germ theory took hold in the public’s mind.
. . . .
“Themes of cross-class infection and romance were staples of… disease melodramas. Sick workers infected the beloved wives and children of greedy businessmen and slum lords; innocent young women and noble doctors served as instruments of their salvation,” writes Tomes. She also notes that politically, “T.B. served well as a vehicle for pushing a wide range of societal reforms aimed at easing the dislocations of urbanization and industrialization.”
Link to the rest at JSTOR
People have a more panicky reaction to “democratic” illnesses. It has a similar root to the fear of flying because it’s about not having control of life-and-death choices. Type 2 diabetes is something we can make choices about but it’s the luck of the draw when the wrong person sneezes on you and infects you with a lethal disease. Something about the latter is more frightening.
For something really frightening consider a crafted pathogen strategically distributed, the core conceit behind the John Ringo BLACK TIDE RISING series.
The idea, quite doable, is an artificially mutated rabies virus that masquerades as influenza for a two stage expression. Initial infection manifests as the flu until the infection reaches critical mass at which point a very virulent version of rabies hits the nervous system.
And yes, it is a very “democratic” pathogen as it infects ninety-plus percent of the species within weeks.
A fun read if you don’t mind lots and lots and lots of gunfire.
Less fun if you consider he did his biological homework thoroughly.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/BlackTideRising
Speaking of doing your biological homework, a good friend in undergrad (interesting guy; his uncle was a Panzergruppe commander in WW2; the uncle gave him his Wehrmacht binocs and carmera; did you know that Wehrmacht officers were required to submit photos to OKO for propaganda purposes?) . . . anyway, back to the story . . . a good friend in undergrad wrote a paper on virological warfare. Somehow that paper made its way to the Secretary of the Army, and my friend found himself with a full-ride scholarship to George Washington University for a master’s degree. Surprised us all.
Really? It’s a mystery?
Of course diseases that are more or less “self-inflicted”, coming from risky lifestyles and socially disapproved behavior, will be ignored by the media in favor of “hit by lightning” and “it could be you” contagious diseases.
Don’t need to go further than AIDS, which became a “crisis” only after it became clear it wasn’t just homosexuals at risk. (Also when media staff became part of the victim pool.)
Mass media is only interested in mass audiences.
That’s why they devote so much attention to weather porn and celebruty-promoted diseases.