In recent months the world has witnessed Swine flu develop and spread rapidly, from the 26th April where the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared a Public Health Emergency, to now where by the level is set at Pandemic, and President Obama has declared the situation a National Emergency. Britain has recently started their vaccination programme to prevent large numbers of the population contracting it. Unfortunately the USA has had a worsened impact, and by declaring an emergency Barack Obama has given health authorities more options for hospitals and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The source of the H1N1 flu strain was first observed by Mexico in January, 2009 and in March the level of infections was thought to be at an epidemic stage.

Nick Griffin (MEP) and leader of the British National Party (BNP), a far right, whites-only political party in Great Britain has attempted to use the Swine Flu pandemic to his advantage. The nationalist party caused controversy over some claims they have made regarding the Swine flu situation. Britain first went into a containment stage. This was where the idea was to stop the spread of the virus, and hopefully contain it. Unfortunately this didn’t happen. But the BNP were accused of using this stage of containment to push forward their far right views and policies on how to contain the virus if a BNP government was in power. Some of the suggested proposals were; offering half-hour medical examinations on foreigners arriving in Britain who display “coughs or sneezes”, they would have recommended that schools would be shut for two weeks, and for councils to turn off air-conditioning, all attempts to push their views across while also trying to contain the disease.

Richard Barnbrook is the representative of the BNP on the London Assembly. He claimed that contrary to belief, the virus actually originated in Africa opposed to Mexico. While having no scientific evidence to support this claim, it is likely he made it in conjunction with the BNP’s policy on immigration. So that if he could show that, under a BNP government immigration rules would be so much tighter that, it is unlikely swine flu will reach Britain. A spokesman for the anti-racist group Searchlight said: “Only the BNP would try to hijack a global pandemic to promote their agenda of division and hate.”

In more recent news the BNP have reported on the case that, an incident has occurred whereby a Muslim NHS worker has refused to using the provided Alcohol based hand gel, which the government have supplied NHS centres with to try and contain the spread of the flu as well as they can. The council involved with the complaint, issued the Muslim worker with a non-alcohol based gel which has been proven to reduce the effectiveness in killing the bug.

The BNP have been using swine flu as a form of propaganda by scaremongering the public. We expect them to continue with their close link to swine flu, and using it to their advantage in the coming months as we seem the full extent that swine flu will have in the northern hemisphere’s Flu season.