In the flurry of activity and worry around the new “swine flu” outbreak, people can be forgiven for thinking it’s no time for 'ethics', but from where I sit, pandemics have everything to do with ethics. 

A pandemic tests the moral fibre of a community.  Do we really care about our neighbors, and about the way in which we might help them in their time of unanticipated need?  Or are we only interested in keeping ourselves safe?

There's a great book by Rodney Stark

called 'The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal, Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in a Few Centuries'.  He tells how Christianity grew after a plague hit ancient Rome.  The doctors and the wealthy fled town.  The generally poor Christians had no villas to retreat to,  but they didn’t die out because they cared for their neighbors, Christian or not, and saved many lives.  After the plague dissipated, people realized that worshiping Jesus made a difference in this world too.

When a new virus goes 'viral', it’s not only Christians who care, of course; thank God!  (And I mean that—thank God.  God sensitizes the hearts of people whether they acknowledge him or not.  But that’s a subject for another day.)  Witness the thousands who turned out to help neighbors and virtual strangers during the Katrina disaster, and the many who drove all night to help sandbag in Fargo, ND.  Good people do good things everyday; they just don't warrant headlines.

By the way, I’ve been fascinated by the impact of calling this new bug a “swine flu.”  People have stopped eating pork in the mistaken belief that that would protect them and so pig farmers have wanted a name change. Just think of the environmental and economic impact of all those Egyptian farmers being forced to kill their carefully tended herds.  News to me was the objection of an Israeli health official; apparently ultra-Orthodox Jews are so abstemious when it comes to all things porcine that it’s offensive to them even to use the word “swine.”  Now the World Health Organization has waded in and is calling this flu “H1N1 Influenza A”.   

 Ben Sherwood - Five things we all need to know

For the latest update from the NYT

For the latest update from the Huffington Post