SO MUCH FOR THE SWINE FLU. CAN WE PANIC ABOUT HUNGER NOW?

In what has to be a severe blow to those medical reporters you only see once in a while on TV, the widely advertised worldwide pandemic of swine flu is turning out to be no big deal. Not that anyone other than pseudo-journalists are disappointed, since the last thing this world needs is something else to kill us off in droves. Hell, we've already got the regular flu, which kills a couple of hundred thousand people across the world every year. Topping the flu as a killer of young people is car crashes. Topping car crashes is war, good for hundreds of thousands of annual deaths, sometimes spiking into the millions when a real doozy is being waged. Then you have your old reliable big time killers of humans, diseases like malaria, cancer, AIDS, diabetes and the like, slaying hundreds and hundreds of of thousands annually. An even bigger killer than these mainstream ailments are the many diseases contracted from drinking contaminated water, a steady 5 to 6 million deaths every year.

But the real heavyweight champ of human killers is, and has always been been, starvation. While not technically a disease, it might as well be since it is pandemic in proportion and kills 36,000 people every single day, one person every 2.4 seconds. Oops, there goes another one! That's 13,140,000 human beings every year, year in and year out, except for leap years, when the death toll jumps another 36,000. The vast majority of these dead people are children under the age of 5. Their death is a slow and painfully tortuous one, a death not even the cruelest barbarian would inflict upon his enemies. And yet, to date, no armies of medical reporters or outraged journalists have seen fit to alarm the world about this eternal genocide.

While it is right and proper to remember and honor the victims of the Nazi holocaust of the 1940's, bear in mind that the annual death total for that act of genocide is double that, a brand new holocaust every six months! Where are the memorials, the documentaries bearing witness to the senseless slaughter of mostly children? The sadder thing is that starvation is easily curable. The medicine, already widely available in surplus amounts, is food. No decades-long medical research effort is required to find a cure. The cure is sitting on shelves and in warehouses of prosperous nations right now.

Can we treat starvation as an emergency? It is, after all, the very definition of one. Picture any other calamity claiming the lives of 36,000 people every day, whether it is a volcano, a war or some new deadly disease. Wouldn't that get the world's attention? It would dominate the headlines of every newspaper and be the main focus of every single TV and radio broadcast. Billions would be freely donated to find a remedy and aid the victims, statesmen would outdo themselves in impassioned speeches and the world would be called upon to unite in the face of this dire threat.

That's not the case with starvation, though, the world's dirty little secret, 36,000 small, twisted and emaciated bodies swept under the rug every day, a fresh corpse every 2.4 seconds. Think of the photos of the piles of skeletal corpses from the death camps of the holocaust. Now picture their faces as toddlers and pre-schoolers. Just like your own children in every respect, minus the joy, the comfort and the protection they take for granted, as well they should. Where is the joy in these children? Who will protect them? Who will teach them, and who will help them grow? When nobody is even willing to tell their story on the world stage, how can they ever be saved?

The means are available to save the starving. The means are also available to educate their poverty stricken parents on how to farm more effectively, how to secure sanitary water supplies and how to preserve food. It is the will to do so that is lacking. There is certainly no profit to be made from doing this, at least not in terms of money, so maybe that's the problem. The profit to our human spirit, however, will be incalculable. Imagine being a part of the generation that finally swore to eradicate hunger after all these thousands of years of human strife and bickering, of all those bloodthirsty butchers earning the nickname "The Great" for the act of killing on a grand scale?

Imagine being part of a movement to reject the hostile way of life and beginning to save lives on a grand scale? It is possible, it's doable and it's not nearly as complicated or expensive as waging war. The effort won't automatically unite mankind or any of that idealistic crap, but it will be the right and proper thing to do, reward enough in and of itself. To declare in the United Nations and in every world capital a Universal Right to Eat and a Right to Live would not solve the problem immediately, but it would officially recognize this catastrophe and formalize the policy for saving the lives of the weakest and most vulnerable among us, the starving children of this world. Starvation is something for us to panic about, and to move heaven and earth to conquer. It is a holocaust, a pandemic and a killer tsunami rolled into one, every day and every year. How long will we turn our backs on our brothers and sisters? You're on the computer now and you're done reading this. Now look up a worldwide food charity and see how you can help. You'll be glad you did.