Pestilence. Death. Chaos. End of the Earth.
The dire warnings are upon us. The chicken flu has descended up on the earth, and life as we know it will come to an end shortly.
Okay, now that I got the dramatic introduction out of the way, there is a terrific commentary in the LA Times about the dreaded avian flu, and how things may be a little bit out of proportion.
The flu season in the US has been a quiet one, despite the Great Vaccine Shortage of ‘04. No increase in the death rate, hospitalizations, and so forth. So is the paranoia about an impending epidemic just something to keep the flu in the news?
According to the LA Times commentary, which was written by Wendy Orent (author of “Plague: The Mysterious Past and Terrifying Future of the World’s Most Dangerous Disease”Free Press, 2004), things were pretty quiet on the influenza frontlines until Julie Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, revived the specter of flu catastrophe and sent it flapping around the world again. In an address to the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science, she reportedly said, “Every time there’s a new [flu type], we get a new pandemic” — an erroneous remark her spokesperson, Tom Skinner, denies she made.
Interesting.
No Immediate Threat
The theory of the dreaded bird flu is this, and this is the notion being peddled by Gerberding and other international health experts who flaunt long list of credentials: The circulation of lethal bird flu in Southeast Asia, and the disease’s ability to infect mammals, means that it will probably evolve to spread among people. When it does, we will have no immunity, because H5N1 is new to humans. And hundreds of millions may die.
So is the chicken now public enemy #1?
Acording to Orent, bird flus are nothing new and exciting, and have been plaguing us for decades. In 1957-58, H2N2 flu spread around the world, causing 70,000 deaths in the U.S. In 1968-69, another variety, H3N2, killed about 36,000 in the U.S. The 1968 outbreak is comparable with the death toll from a normal flu season, so it is curious why it is even mentioned in the Annals of Great and Terrible Flu Outbreaks.
Now compare both of these instances to the Spanish flu pandemic, which in 1918, killed between 20 million and 40 million people. So why didn’t these bird flus mutate and cause millions to die, as is predicted for this current strain? Good question, but no one’s rushing to supply an answer.
Infectious disease expert Michael Osterholm insists that because the planet is far more crowded and transportation more rapid than in 1918, H5N1 could cause the worst disease outbreak in history.
The planet was certainly crowded during the 1950s and 1960s. The latest bird flu outbreaks have been reported since 1997, in very very very crowded areas, like Hong Kong. Breathing space is at a premium over there. But yet, no pandemic.
Orent finds that the current logic (and I have to agree with her at this point, in lieu of the dearth of any real hard data) has more holes than a tennis racket. She points out that avian flu evolved to kill chickens, and not people, and it attacks those who drink infected chicken blood, wade in chicken feces or slaughter sick chickens for food. In other words, all of its human victims have typically been exposed to massive doses of the chicken virus. It isn’t something that they picked up in passing, or caught because their co-worker sneezed in their face.
Now here is another important point, and one not likely to over well with agribusiness. Our “new and modern methods” of farming and raising chickens and othe fowl have really set the stage for widespread epidemics.
The H5N1 has evolved great virulence among chickens only because of the conditions under which the animals are kept — crammed together in cages, packed into giant warehouses. H5N1 was originally a mild virus found in migrating ducks; if it killed its host immediately, it too would die. But when its next host’s beak is just an inch away, the virus can evolve to kill quickly and still survive.
Human epidemics evolve in much the same manner. Those stinking crowded tenements are a feast to behold for pathogenic microbes. Why do you think that people always worry about impending epidemics everytime there is a war or natural disaster, like the recent tsunami? Hordes of people crowded together in less than optimal circumstances (like chickens in factory farms) create the ideal breeding ground for insidious microbes.
As evolutionary biologist Paul Ewald of the University of Louisville has pointed out, the same process “cooked” the virulence of the 1918 flu, though instead of chickens in cages it was soldiers in World War I’s trenches, hospitals and transports who fell victim to a virus that became increasingly deadly as it cycled among them.
It’s illogic to expect that, in the absence of trench warfare or other human “disease factories,” flu will evolve to be a pandemic terror. And no one has identified such conditions near the chicken farms of Southeast Asia. In other words, if avian flu ever does adapt enough to spread easily to humans, its lethality will have to drop. It may well cause another pandemic, as we indeed have no resistance to it, but it cannot be a pandemic as lethal as the 1918 flu.
Interesting points to ponder, as the media recants the “warnings” of the experts, and keeps repeating the hysteria without giving us any real data on why. Why? Why? Why?
