Bird Flu Risk Bottoms Out

Weekly Standard: Hysteria About Pandemic Unnecessary; Too Much Money Spent

(Weekly Standard)  This column was written by Michael Fumento

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It's that time of year again — avian flu panic season. As the weather turns colder in the Northern Hemisphere and the flu starts making its annual rounds, the media and their anointed health experts are chirping and squawking once again about how we could be blindsided by a pandemic that some have estimated could kill a billion persons worldwide. New books like "The Coming Avian Flu Pandemic" join last year's "The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu."

A year ago in these pages I clucked at all this, laying out the evidence that the alarmists were wrong, that avian influenza type H5N1 would not become readily transmissible from human to human and therefore not become pandemic — meaning a global epidemic. (See "Fuss and Feathers: Pandemic Panic over the Avian Flu," November 21, 2005.) Some of the arguments I made have quietly caught on. For instance, health officials, including National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Dr. Anthony Fauci, no longer talk about an "overdue pandemic" (because there is no pattern to when pandemics occur; they are never "due" or "overdue"). But the damage has been done. A Harvard School of Public Health survey of adults who have children revealed that 44 percent think it "likely" or "somewhat likely" there will be "cases of bird flu among humans in the U.S. during the next 12 months." Less than a fifth of respondents considered it "not at all" likely.

Not coincidentally, an avian flu bureaucracy has become entrenched. Like all bureaucracies, it will fight to survive and thrive, egging on governments to provide ever more money. The alarmingly titled 2006 Guide to Surviving Bird Flu is published by no less than the Department of Health and Human Services. Never mind that no one in this country has yet even contracted bird flu. Congress last year allocated $3.8 billion to prevent the ballyhooed catastrophe (Bush requested almost twice that amount). The latest "scary news," promulgated in the November 23 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine by über-alarmist Robert Webster of St. Jude Memorial Children's Hospital, is that human cases of H5N1 contracted from birds are continuing to increase. Indeed, confirmed cases for 2006 are running ahead of those for last year. But the difference is slight; 97 worldwide for all of last year versus 111 through the end of November 2006. This difference could be entirely explained by better surveillance. Moreover, the real concern is not sporadic bird-to-human transmission, but human-to-human transmission. Far more people die of tuberculosis in an hour than all those known to have died from H5N1.

So it's time to revisit the allegations and show that, as small as the risk was a year ago, it's nevertheless dropped considerably since.

Mutation and Reassortment

A flu pandemic can come about in two ways. One way is for the virus to randomly mutate to become easily transmissible between humans. "Randomly" is the key word here. There are no evolutionary pressures to make H5N1 adapt better to humans. Given enough time, H5N1 might mutate so that it could under the right conditions become pandemic. But that could take millions of years, during which time it would be more likely to mutate itself out of existence. H5N1 was first identified in Scottish chickens in 1959. It has been flying around the globe for close to half a century and hasn't done a number on us yet. There's absolutely no reason to think it will pick this year or next to do so.

Another scenario is that somebody with human flu could contract avian flu at the same time and the two flus could "reassort" into hybrid avian-human flu. The last two flu epidemics in the 20th century — 1957-58 and 1968-69 — were caused by such hybrids. We can help reduce this possibility by vaccinating as many people as possible (especially Southeast Asian poultry farmers) against human flu, thus reducing the potential number of "mixing vessels." Programs under way to keep farmers away from poultry droppings and spittle (birds don't sneeze or cough) will also help.

Ferreting Out the Truth

A fascinating study in the August 8, 2006, issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences would seem to indicate we're already pretty safe from a human-avian hybrid. Researchers from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention conducted three separate studies with ferrets, which are among the few animals known to suffer from and transmit human flu. The ferrets were infected with several H5N1 strains in addition to a common human influenza virus (H3N2) that circulates almost every year. The infected animals were then either placed in the same cage with uninfected ferrets to test transmissibility by close contact or in adjacent cages with perforated walls to test spread of the virus from respiratory droplets.

The Bird Flu should not be joked about, if you find some bird flu on the ground, you should report it to the OMG ITS THE BIRD FLEW! association at once by calling 1-800-OMG-I-FOUND-A-BIRD-FLU-ON-GROUND- AND-I-THINK-ITS-GOING-TO-MUTATE-AND-KILL-ME-SOON-SO-I-BETTER-CALL-THIS- 1-800-NUMBER-AND-REPORT-WHAT-I-SEE.

More importantly, Governments of various countries are trying to control the number of people dead by Bird Flu. So, if you are dead or almost dead due to Bird Flu, call 1-800-OMG-THE-BIRD-FLU-IS-KILLING-ME (toll free if in Samoa). Your friendly Bird Flu call center will guide you over the phone step-by-step to make sure you are not infected by Bird Flu. They will accept American Express or Visa as a method of payment for the $59.95 per minute hidden charge of the toll free line.

[sjc_1]

The flu of 1918 killed 50 million people. This one could kill even more. Every dollar spent to prevent this is better than spending 10 times that much after the fact.

[flutrackers]

We encourage all points of view; however, Mr. Fumento%u2019s opinion is reckless. When his opinion was only posted on his and the Weekly Standard websites, not many were exposed to his anti-pandemic rhetoric. Now, however, with the posting here on CBS News.com his dangerous position that the potential for a H5N1 pandemic has diminished is being disseminated worldwide to millions. These are millions who will never prepare. More millions will never see the threat because they will be convinced that if ferrets can not pass the virus between each other in a laboratory setting, then humans never will efficiently either. CBS %u2013 please formally invite one of the following to write an opposing opinion: Michael Osterholm, PhD (CIDRAP), Michael Levitt, M.D. (Secretary of Health and Human Services), Julie Gerberding, M.D. (Centers for Disease Control), or Michael Navarro, M.D. (United Nations). Please give their opinion the same prominence as Mr. Fumento. We, at FluTrackers.com have accumulated many scientific articles, studies, and opinions that point to the possibility of an H5N1 pandemic. The threat has not diminished. In fact, it is greater.

Snowy Owl Editorial
"The Chicken Littles Were Right"

http://www.flutrackers.com/forum/showthread.php?t=14277

[oleander8]

CBS you are part of the media that manufactures these crises that foment panic. Shame on you!

[donfrench]

The thing is, the mainstream media have all but ignored bird flu in the past half year. And even before that, the alarms were coming mostly from the virologists, epidemiologists and highly respected international health agencies, not the media, and not the government. So, the theory that bird flu is a media concoction is just not true. Ditto, the theory that the government is using it to try to manipulate the population or that Rumsfeld is responsible because he owns a lot of stock in the company that makes Tamiflu. The alarms were and are stil being raised mostly by responsible, nothing-to-gain scientists who know what could happen if this influenza virus ever mutates to become human viruses. like the 1918, 1957, and 1968 bird flu viruses did.

Fumento, on the other hand, makes his living as an independent journalist whose beat is writing stories that counter prevailing scientific opinion. He also has conflict of interest problems, so caveat emptor.

[processor2]

Another crisis created by Mainstream ("liberal") media

Other manufactured "crisis"

1) Bird Flu

2) Y2K

3) Global Warming, etc,etc

[donfrench]

Bird flu has mutated by the process Fumento implies would take a million years three times in the last century, 1918 (the Spanish Flu which was the greatest pandemic of all time, eclipsing the black plague), 1957 (the Asian Flu which sickened every single kid in my junior high school but was not a killer), 1968 (the Hong Kong flu, which roared through almost every family in America, but killed very few of us). The catastrophic 1918 flu was 2% fatal compared to the current avian flu, which is 50-80% fatal. So, we can expect that if H5N1 mutates to become transmissible between humans (and we are all agreed that we don't know for sure if it will) that it will spread farther and faster than any other flu virus in history due to modern air travel. And, like the three other avian flu viruses gone bad in the past century, humans will have no immunity to it and it will infect nearly everyone. Only this time, half of the infected will die from it if it maintains its current level of virulence (and it might not, we don't know yet). But try to imagine that scenario. Even if it is improbable, the carnage and the devastation to civilization would be so massive, should it happen, that it is imperative to plan for the possibility, and not try to influence people to be unprepared. That is just immoral.

Search for Dr. Michael Osterholm, one of the world's foremost experts on epidemiology and avian flu. An interview with him in City Pages is worth reading carefully.

[jpcarpenter]

The over-arching problem with the author's argument is that the possibility and probability of a pandemic influenza outbreak is tied to one virus - H5N1. The reality is that this one virus is one of many, any one of which could change into a pandemic capable virus.
The real issue is that there is little or no doubt in anyone's mind that a pandemic outbreak will occur. The when's and how's are the unanswered questions.
Simply, what we have here is an issue of possibility and probability. Both fall in the positive. The realities of readiness and preparedness unfortunately fall in the negative.

[bluestardad]

People don't buy that scare tactic to raise the price of poltry you pimps. Some of the media got spanked for running all the (BS) the Tyson boys wanted ran!

[luis214-2009]

what are Michael Fumento credentials? these are all good points but before i take into consideration what his opinions on the bird flu are id like to know what the basis for them are.

[olebd]

Warm weather from global warming will do more damage to our overall health than these birds can.

[creeper00]

Another manufactured crisis. There are always people who make out like bandits in situations like this...either collecting large amounts of money or claiming their fifteen minutes of fame.

Remember Y2K?

The sad part is that these horror-stories-turned-fiction make it hard to get people to understand when a true crisis comes along. See "Global warming."