Flu Jab

I went down to get my flu jab this morning. The surgery was very busy, but we were processed through very quickly and efficiently. I'm not quite old enough to merit a flu jab on my own account, and have no health problems, asthma etc, that might qualify me, but I qualify as a carer. In fact I seem hardly ever to catch flu, but it's better safe than sorry, always.

Flu is a serious threat every winter, and the epidemic that does real damage, when it comes as one day it will, is probably going to be a new variant on flu. I suppose today's flu jab wouldn't protect me from a new strain, but the existing ones are bad enough, so I'm glad we do it, and that as many people as do opt to receive it, and if it gets us all through this winter that'll be something. In the meantime, ebola . . . we have been rather slow to respond to this one. Perhaps West Africa isn't very high on the international radar? Perhaps we rather thought it was a tropical disease striking a part of the world where life is pretty cheap anyway, until people in Texas started catching it.

The quality of our world community is to be measured not just by our military response to, say, ISIS in Iraq or Syria, or in our technological co-operation in such projects as CERN or the International Space Station, but in our willingness to respond, and to respond speedily to crises like the one caused by ebola. The UNO believes (according to today's press) that we have fallen short here, and who am I to disagree? Liberia and Sierra Leone are far from economic giants, nor are they important in any strategic sense (as far as I know, anyway), but that only makes the way we respond (or don't) to their need a better and more rigorous test of our humanity.

It occurs to me also that both these countries are, in their foundation, responses to one of the deepest shadows on our western conscience, the transatlantic slave trade. Maybe that might also motivate and inform the generosity of our response: arguably, we still owe them.