Health Scare Professionals

And, by God, they're good at what they do.

As WHO cranks-up the drama to a Level 5 panic, once more the scale of the actual sickness fails miserably to keep pace with perfectly matches the scale of government displacement activity (GDA). A standard, full-scale GDA response has been triggered by the Chief Medical Loony Officer: Scot, Liam Donaldson.

Orders for millions of doses of expensive anti-common sense vaccines have been placed as a contingency against localised outbreaks of rational thought, and millions more German surgical masks have been ordered to head-off any shortfall in expenditure from the extra-special Mandatory Money-Wasting Budget. These masks are only to be worn by the hundreds of thousands of accredited health scare professionals. "It's more than just a uniform thing," according to Andrew Lansley, the Shadow Spokesman for Health Scares, "they only work for frontline health scare staff, because health scare professionals are, in fact, a different species of human being altogether, I'm reliably informed."

Special action, made possible by new laws now available to GDA officials under the Plan to Avoid Natural Incredulity and Common Sense (PANICS) legislation (2006), is to be taken against (soon-to-be) discredited journalist Simon Jenkins for this dangerously level-headed article in a major national newspaper today. He wrote:

Epidemiologists love the word "could" because it can always assure them of a headline. During the avian flu mania, Canada geese were treated like Goering's bombers. RSPB workers were issued with protective headgear.The media went berserk, with interviewers asking why the government did not close all schools "to prevent up to 50,000 deaths". The Today programme's John Humphrys became frantic when a dead goose flopped down on an isolated Scottish beach and a hapless local official refused to confirm the BBC's hysteria. The bird might pose no threat to Scotland, but how dare he deny London journalists a good panic?

Meanwhile a real pestilence, MRSA and C difficile, was taking hold in hospitals. It was suppressed by the medical profession because it appeared that they themselves might be to blame. These diseases have played a role in thousands of deaths in British hospitals - the former a reported 1,652 and the latter 8,324 in 2007 alone. Like deaths from alcoholism, we have come to regard hospital-induced infection as an accident of life, a hazard to which we have subconsciously adjusted.

This appalling complacency in the face of a threat that could mean the end of all human and pig life as we know it will not go unpunished. GDA has already issued an order for Mr Jenkins' removal from the Prime Minister's Christmas card list. However, it was decided that some leniency be afforded Jenkins in acknowledgment of his decision not to include in his scurrilous report the irrelevant facts that 250 million people suffered and one million people died from Malaria last year alone, thanks mainly to the entirely logical decision taken by top WHO Health Scare Professionals to advise countries recently not to use DDT to combat this disease, stating that it was "very much concerned with health consequences from the use of DDT".

A WHO insider claimed, sensibly: "Well, new types of effective DDT are extremely expensive to research, develop and distribute and malaria victims are only poor bastards who're gonna die from something else anyway, so why bother? If they were Americans or even Brits, of course - well, that's a different matter altogether, isn't it? "

Jenkins' outbursts concerning other officially ignored infections...

MRSA and C difficile are not like swine flu, an opportunity for public figures to scare and posture and spend money. They are diseases for which the government is to blame. They claim no headlines and no Cobra priority. Their sufferers must crawl away and die in silence.

were roundly condemned by the official spokeman for the Department of Government Displacement Activities as 'unnecessary and wholely unfounded scare-mongering from a dangerously level-headed, non-Health Scare Professional.

'Mr Jenkins should get his priorities right,' she added.

==Stop Press==
"The Daily Mash is next on our list of swine flu apocalypse deniers to be silenced," the spokesman mumbled, apparently in what she thought was an inaudible afterthought.