Sunday Times columnist India Knight has “armed” herself with homeopathic remedies to protect herself and her five year old daughter against Swine Flu.

She thought she had Swine Flu herself recently and was concerned about her daughter who has a heart condition.

She writes: “I thought I had swine flu on Wednesday. Perhaps I did — who knows? Except that the massive aching in my limbs — it exhausted me to raise my arms to wash my hair — and general hot grogginess had gone by Thursday. But I suppose that I could have had mild swine flu all week, building up to an exciting and noticeably swiney crescendo. We shall never know.

Happily, I had tried to do my swine flu homework a couple of weeks ago when a case was confirmed at my five-year-old daughter's school. She has a heart condition and an enfeebled immune system, so the news sent me into something of a panic, because I suddenly realised that despite watching endless television reports and reading endless newspaper ones, I didn’t actually know anything — the reports had served only to confuse me.

On the one hand: eh, it’s just flu. On the other: yeah, but you might die. You switch off the telly thinking: really, cheers for that. What do I do now — lie down quietly and wait for the reaper, or march around ticking people off for overreacting because “it’s only flu”? Both options seem reasonable. Which is it to be?

By the time my arms started feeling like lead, I’d already heard the v-e-r-y s-l-o-w recorded National Health Service message you get if you call the swine line, already telephoned various council departments to get a number that would connect me to an actual doctor for advice, already spent 43 (I counted) minutes in the dedicated NHS helpline queue to speak to same.

When I eventually got through, the doctor was reassuring: we might have all had swine flu already, he said, without noticing anything dramatically amiss. No, I couldn’t have Tamiflu for preventive purposes, because the epidemic meant my daughter would have to stay on it for months, which, given the lack of information about the long-term effects of the drug, wasn’t a good idea. Calpol and Nurofen, as usual in case of fever, and — well, you know, best of luck.

Tamiflu

My GP said much the same thing. My daughter’s cardiologist said he wasn’t overly worried but to check with her immunologist at Great Ormond Street hospital, who said children with my daughter’s condition should take Tamiflu if they actually got swined up. Sounds reasonable, except for one thing: nobody knows if anyone’s swined up because there are no swab tests any more — everyone’s guessing.

We’re not supposed to take our swiney selves or our swiney children into doctors’ surgeries, and doctors are far too busy for house calls, so, as far as I can see, we’re all in the dark. Also, I don’t like the sound of Tamiflu, with its side effects and lack of long-term trials. But then I don’t like the sound of death, either.

No wonder every parent I spoke to last week was in a state of controlled panic — except for the ones who’ve had swine flu, who were all cheerful and said, “Pah, it’s not so bad; you just go to bed for a few days” — although they all said there was absolutely zero support or advice available to them other than: “Don’t go to work.”

This — “it’s not so bad” — had been my take on it until healthy people started dying. Now I’m hovering between, “Yes, but healthy people still die of normal flu — not many, but some, just as some women still die in childbirth and nobody gets pregnant and then starts running around wailing about death,” and, “Oh my God, oh my God, what are we going to do?”

Homeopathy

So far I have failed to come up with a plan. I used my low journalistic cunning to sweet-talk two chemists into telling me where the stocks of Tamiflu for my area of London were held, so now I know where to break into if we suddenly find ourselves burning up in the middle of the night. And I’ve ordered some homeopathic remedies.

I know that even writing “homeopathic remedies” antagonises some people to the point of foaming at the mouth, but despite the fact that the rational part of my brain doesn’t actually believe in homeopathy, I find it often works (especially with children). So, armed with my little pilules and the address of the Tami-chemist (crowbar optional), I sit and wait.

Everyone else is sitting and waiting, too. A friend whose son has a condition that affects his lungs wondered whether to send him away, except it would have to be for months and there’s no guarantee that he wouldn’t come home to an extra-virulent, super-horrible strain of the flu.

Another friend sent an e-mail saying she had no idea what was going on but didn’t want to bother her GP, who was so kind and so busy, by asking. A third said much the same thing: “I feel like a poor relation in a Russian novel. I’m slightly too embarrassed to ask for help. And anyway, there isn’t really any help.”

The parents I know who a month or so ago were thinking everyone should get the swine-infected kids together with the healthy ones, much as you deliberately make your child catch chickenpox so it’s over and done with, have done a U-turn. At work I hear everyone has thoughtfully been provided with a couple of packets of mini-Kleenex and some antibacterial wipes. All the families I know are wondering whether to cancel their holidays: what if they end up in some swine-swamp, some fatal hotspot, by accident?

In between thinking about the plagues of Israel and Camus’s La Peste, I’ve tried not to become hysterical — and mostly succeeded. There’s a lot to be said for being sanguine. We’re all going to get it or look after someone with it. Most of us will be fine. There’s not a lot we can do about it, short of observing basic hygiene rules. A vaccine will scoot along at some stage and perhaps won’t be made by a company with a history of making vaccines that sometimes, er, kill people. And that’s it.

There’s been a poster that’s been popular in middle-class homes for some time. It’s a reproduction of a second world war information ministry poster that says, “Keep Calm and Carry On”. I note that the company that manufactures it has now created a companion poster that reads, “Now Panic and Freak Out”. Like most people, I’m hovering between the two.

Calm wins, until I start wondering whether we couldn’t maybe put red “X”s on the doors of the infected, plague-style."

India Knight, Sunday Times July 19th 2009