On Americans and Bird Flu
By Brian Wise (10/11/05)
How long did it take you to get over SARS? Oh, you didn’t get SARS? Exactly. You won’t get bird flu, either; neither will anyone you know. In fact, of the nearly 300 million people crammed into these 50 States, only a very, very, very small number will become infected, if any at all. That doesn’t mean media won’t tell you an American crisis is imminent, especially when the only other interesting story has to do with the conservative movement’s immolating itself over a Supreme Court nominee.
No piece of mainstream journalism has flatly said bird flu is a third world problem, but it’s there if you read between the lines. From as Associated Press report on Monday, dateline Bangkok: “Leading a multinational team of medical experts to mobilize Southeast Asian nations against bird flu, Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt said … the likelihood of a flu pandemic in the future is ‘very high.’ Leavitt, accompanied by the director of the World Health Organization and other top professionals, is visiting Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam to seek their collaboration in preparing for the anticipated public health emergency. In the past 2 ½ years, the H5N1 strain of bird flu has swept through poultry populations in Southeast Asia, infecting humans and killing at least 65 people.” The emphasis is mine.
Same article: “Also Monday, Turkey and Romania slaughtered thousands of domestic fowl after both countries said they found the disease in birds …. In western Turkey, military police quarantined the area around two villages … in Balikesir province, as veterinarians killed thousands of poultry. Other fowl, including pigeons, and stray dogs also were to be killed as a precaution …. Preliminary tests detected bird flu at a farm in Turkey after some 1,800 birds died last week.” Again, the emphasis is mine.
Scientists at the Centers for Disease Control have recreated the virus responsible for the 1918 influenza pandemic, the deadliest in world history. Its press release on the subject quotes Dr. Julie Gerberding: “We need to know much more about pandemic influenza viruses. Research such as this helps us understand what makes some influenza viruses more harmful than others. It also provides us information that may help us identify, early on, influenza viruses that could cause a pandemic.”
Somewhere between 20 and 50 million people died as a result of the 1918 outbreak; 675,000 of those were Americans. Though the CDC does us a service by isolating and learning from the 1918 strain, it pays to compare and contrast public health standards between 1918 and the current day. In doing so you discover that even though 1918 may be repeatable in Southeast Asia, where those standards are often less than stellar, it’s much less likely to happen here, where the standards are so high they occasionally border on hyperactive. (Evidence of this comes with any study of the 1957 and 1968 pandemics; as our scientific knowledge grew, pandemic related deaths decreased significantly.)
Whereas today government would simply call upon certain drug companies to produce more of a certain vaccine or drug (GlaxoSmithKline produces an in-demand vaccine for bird flu), antiviral drugs didn’t exist in 1918. Public health officials were left to rely upon what were then modern standards. Stanford University maintains some brief, fine writings on the subject online; one notes that “[while] most of the measures were solidly grounded in the current scientific concepts, they could also be traced back to Medieval and even Classical times of plague and pestilence. The public health authorities in both the United States and Europe took up fundamental measures to control epidemics that dated back to Medieval times of the Bubonic Plague.” In other words, their modern concepts were rooted in the 1350s.
The point is that medical science in 2005 is decidedly rooted in 2005 (and beyond, it seems sometimes). More North Koreans will die from regime-fueled starvation on Tuesday than have died, worldwide, from bird flu in the last 2½ years, or that will ever die from it in the United States.
But in The People’s common defense, government will prepare itself as best it can for the worst. Having learned from last year’s flu vaccine mishaps, President Bush will soon tell us about the 200 million doses of bird flu vaccine that will be ready in about six months, not to forget the distribution plan the government will enact if things get hairy. They won’t, and this medicine will rot, but it’s better to be safe than sorry.
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