Pigging out on the flu

Global media have been on a fear-feeding frenzy these past few days over reports of swine flu cases scattered throughout the world.

It is good that relevant agencies, such as the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control, and the Department of Homeland Security, are taking these reports seriously. (Check out this new ASIL Insight on the international law of disease control, by our colleague David P. Fidler.) Good too that government in the site most affected so far, Mexico, is taking extra measures.

As for the media and other global actors, however, it's hard to shake a sense that the subtext of many of their warnings is about something other than saving lives.

Consider:

► A WHO flyer makes clear that eating properly prepared pork poses no swine flu risks. As long as the meat's cooked to 160 degrees Fahrenheit, as it must be for other food-safety reasons, no problem.

So why the "pork bans"?

► As of yesterday, CDC had confirmed 40 U.S. cases of swine flu, contained within 5 of the country's 50 states. That number's less than a third of the students I teach in class on any given day. No deaths had been reported. Indeed, although this strain of influenza is highly contagious, although its symptoms are as acute as those one sees in other severe flus, according to the WHO, "mortality is low (1-4%)."

So why a European Union advisory to avoid travel to the United States?

"This is a rapidly evolving situation," CDC advises, and of course everyone should take care that conditions don't change for the worse. At-risk persons, like the elderly or already ill, should be on special guard. But for the rest of us, for now at least, a bit of sanity coupled with ordinary sanitary measures -- washing hands frequently, staying home if sick, and calling a physician if very sick -- would seem likely to do the flu-fighting trick.

Law and counterinsurgency

Surely a novel addition to the "law and ..." field, yet nonetheless critically important: Law and Counterinsurgency. To learn more, check out Counterinsurgency, Rule of Law Operations, and International Law," an ASIL Insight by our colleague David P. Fidler. The essay underscores the degree to which law matters in 2 books recently released by the U.S. military. Law's an expected subject in the Rule of Law Handbook: A Practitioner's Guide for Judge Advocates; the slogan on the JAG's school's crest (above), after all, reads "Reverence for the Law." Yet law's presence is more of a surprise in other book, the Counterinsurgency Manual. (The latter book proved so surprisingly popular that the University of Chicago Press published it earlier this year, as Samantha Power noted in her own excellent review of that manual and other books related to law and terrorism.)
How does law matter? Here's an example:
The Manual (right) sets out as the ultimate goal "'acceptance by the people of the state or region of the legitimacy of one side's claim to political power,'" Fidler writes. It then "stresses" that this goal cannot be achieved "through military means alone." Rather, "political, economic, diplomatic, military" -- and yes, "legal capabilities" must be deployed "in a manner that comprehensively understands the society and culture..." The Handbook likewise identifies "rule of law operations" -- including adherence to the Geneva Conventions -- as a cornerstone to the establishment of stability in conflict and post-conflict arenas.
Though the military's reliance on international law in these books indeed may be instrumentalist -- or "pragmatic," to use Fidler's term -- reliance even of that nature is remarkable given the way others in the executive branch have treated such law these last many years.