One story has been in the back of my mind for days now: the four-year-old from Qena who at last report was in a Cairo hospital.
The English-language Egyptian media haven't said a word about her, as far as I can tell, and no one seems to have explored the possible connection to the other case in Qena, the ten-year-old who died last Saturday.
H5N1 wouldn't be worth covering if it weren't happening to real people—and real people's children. But the media in hot-zone countries seem intent on reducing the victims to initials, or to names without context. If Texas or New Brunswick or Cornwall had human H5N1 cases, we'd know everything about those cases—maybe much more than we needed to know.
Maybe it's a cultural concern in Vietnam and Indonesia and Egypt, and maybe it stems from an admirable wish to protect the privacy of shocked and grieving families. But it leaves the rest of the world dangerously ignorant of important information—details that might help save lives, and would certainly motivate the rest of the world to offer more help to the stricken countries.
I hope that the big news this weekend will be the full recovery of Dina Ali Taghyan, that four-year-old in the Cairo hospital.
