By TaRessa Stovall

Five-year-old Edgar Hernandez, who reportedly lives near a pig farm in LaGloria, Mexico, was identified on April 29 as “Patient Zero” in the current swine flu outbreak. Before and after Hernandez was identified, reports of the flu virus coming to the U.S. from Mexico inspired some right-wing talk radio hosts to start a viral spread of anti-Mexican rants in the guise of health warnings.

One host, Michael Savage suggested that his listeners avoid all contact “anywhere with an illegal alien. And that starts in the restaurants,” where MSNBC.com reported him saying, “you don’t know if they wipe their behinds with their hands.”

Boston talk radio host Jay Severin was suspended for describing Mexican immigrants as “criminalians” while discussing the swine flu, and calling hospital emergency rooms “essentially condos for Mexicans.” Severin is described by the Boston Globe as having higher radio ratings than Don Imus.

Savage, who described Mexicans as “the lowest of primitives,” also opined that Mexican immigrants are being used by terrorists as human weapons of germ warfare. “It would be easy to bring an altered virus into Mexico, put it in the general population, and have them march across the border,” Savage said.

Those reactions are “tepid compared to some of the xenophobic reactions spreading like an emerging virus across the Internet,” reported an MSNBC.com article, “Amid Swine Flu Outbreak, Racism Goes Viral.”  It quoted an anonymous poster on radio host and columnist Alex Jones’ Web site as saying “‘This disgusting blight is because MEXICANS ARE PIGS!’”

Public health officials in various states are warning against connecting the swine flu outbreak to any group of individuals, and encourage everyone to practice good hygiene and common-sense prevention measures, such as frequent hand-washing and seeking medical care if there are signs of the flu.

With a struggling global economy, massive U.S. unemployment and housing losses, long-term wars and other concerns, isn’t it interesting that some hate-mongers seem to wait for something like the swine flu (which, by the way, was around in 1976) or any other health scare or catastrophic event to unleash their attacks on anyone they perceive as “other?”

“Fearmongering and blame are almost a natural part of infectious disease epidemics, experts say,” according to the MSNBC.com article, which said that “Often, a disease outbreak is an excuse to vent pre-existing prejudices.”

They quote Dr. Howard Markel, a medical historian at the University of Michigan and author of When Germs Travel: Six Major Epidemics That Have Invaded America Since 1900 and the Fears They Have Unleashed, as explaining that Europeans blamed Jews for the medieval Black Plague; the U.S. blamed immigrant European Jews for the 1892 cholera pandemic; and Italians blamed the Spanish and vice-versa for the flu of 1918. “For HIV it was gay men and Haitians,” Markel said.

Amy Fairchild, Chair of Sociomedical Sciences at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health in New York City, told MSNBC.com that “It’s ‘the other,’ the group not seen as part of the nation, the one who threatens it in some way, that gets blamed for the disease.” Americans “have a history of trying to keep ourselves ‘pure,’” Fairchild explained. “You saw it after the Civil War when slaves were denied citizenship, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when we were alarmed over southern and eastern European immigrants. There were fears that they would pollute America’s germ plasm, make us a weak nation of imbeciles.”

My stupid question is: since this latest influenza strain has been dubbed the “swine flu,” why isn’t anyone blaming the pigs?

The racist hate now being aimed at Mexican immigrants, just the latest example of anti-other venom, may present more lasting, long-term damage to America’s well-being-physical and intellectual-than any form of influenza ever could. In the multi-media information age, hate-and-fear-mongering can spread viral racism more quickly and widely than the swine flu can jump from person to person anywhere in the world.

Since it’s not realistic to wash the haters’ mouths out with antibacterial sanitizer, maybe we can all take this opportunity to look inside ourselves and clean out those biases, prejudices and fondness of stereotypes that lurk inside. We all have them, and this latest example should remind us of the damage they can do once we allow them to become activated and unleashed.

TaRessa Stovall is Managing Editor of TheDefendersOnline and Web Content Manager for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc.