The "swine flu", which emerged in Mexico, is now treated officially as a pandemic. But, as usual, the populations of the rich countries stand to be far better protected than the poor majority of the planet. It is one thing to provide cheap surgical masks, whose effectiveness is questionable. But containing the spread of the disease by, at least, detecting infected individuals before they can contaminate others and isolating them, is quite another, which only the richest countries can afford. Even in Britain, one of the world's richest countries, the hospital facilities and the staff required are just not there, especially after the wholesale hospital closures of the past decades.

As to curing patients, it is quite simply a luxury. Not that the scientific know-how is in short supply. Scientists all over the world have been working round the clock to isolate the "swine flu" virus. They have already produced reliable tests and should soon be able to provide an adequate vaccine. But although most of them are working in state-funded laboratories, their results are kept secret. Instead of pooling their findings together, many different teams work in isolation from one another, thereby wasting precious time and effort.

Why? Quite simply because there are huge profits at stake for the pharmaceutical sharks.

Because, in this capitalist society, nothing comes for free, not even the right to live! And the capitalists will stop at nothing to boost their profits, not even when this may result in the death of hundreds of thousands, if not millions. This is yet another indictment of a form of social organisation which is incapable of catering for the needs of the majority.

Much like the "swine flu", today's economic crisis is a pandemic of sorts, a "capitalist pigs' flu". Except that there is no vaccine against it, as the costly failure of the bankers' bailouts has shown.

There is a cure, however, for all the ills of this bankrupt system. But that is the task of the working-class majority of the world, joining forces in order to replace this inept system with a social organisation free of the private profit madness and organised to cater for the needs of all, rather than for the greed of the capitalist few.