Swine Flu.

During the communion at the church last Sunday, the priest refused to put the host on my tongue; he insisted that I take it by my hand. When I asked why, he smiled and said: “It’s the influenza, my child.”

That was the first time that I realized how real the threat of this “swine influenza” (or the H1N1 virus) actually is. And how the precautions that the government says it is taking is anything but reassuring.

The first reported case of the H1N1 virus infection here in Japan occured last week when Health officials confined infected Japanese students who arrived at the Narita Airport in Chiba from a field trip in Canada at a nearby hospital. The government claimed that the fact that they were spotted at the airport and treated immediately proved that the quarantine measures being implemented at different ports of entries are reliable.

But the thing about these quarantine measures is that they detect only the infected people who are already showing the symptoms. There is no way airport officials can know that a person is infected if, for instance, his body temperatures appear normal. This could mean that a person who have just acquired the virus could pass the quarantine inspections at the airports. Which could mean that the virus could very well be spreading domestically already without the Health officials and other people involved knowing it.

Indeed, this might explain why the first reported domestic case of swine flu infection in Kobe happened to a High Schooler who has no history of foreign travel. It is possible that he got infected through contact with a person who came from one of the infected countries and passed the quarantine inspections even though he was in fact infected with the virus.

Of course, it’s not the government’s fault that quarantine measures at airports are not yet capable of detecting early infection. In fact, Health officials are already scrumbling to get enough stockpile of vaccines to treat people. But still, I can’t help but feel a little bit alarmed.

When the SARS epidemic broke out years ago, I thought then that it was a curious piece of news. But although infections occured in two rural towns in the Philippines at that time, I had no doubts that I was safe in Manila.

But this swine flu outbreak is different. Already, almost 150 people have been infected in the Kansai area and two governors there have ordered to suspend all classes in all schools. Unlike in the Philippines where movement of people isn’t as rapid; here, it only takes one infected salary man from Osaka to come via the shinkansen to Tokyo for the virus to spread to the Kanto region. Or worse, the virus might already be here in Tokyo and we just don’t know it yet.

And the worst thing is, I’ll be going back to the Philippines via that budget airline called Cebu Pacific. And Cebu Pacific flies to Manila only from Osaka.