[Mb-civic] The cost of bird flu hysteria - Marc Siegel - Boston Globe Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

  The cost of bird flu hysteria

By Marc Siegel  |  March 17, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

RENOWNED bird flu expert Robert Webster told ABC News this week that 
there were ''about even odds at this time for the virus to learn how to 
transmit human to human," and ''society just can't accept the idea that 
50 percent of the population could die. . . . I'm sorry if I'm making 
people a little frightened, but I feel it's my role."

I disagree. As one of the top flu experts in the world, Webster's role 
is to track influenza in the test tube, not to make sweeping 
speculations that are not based on science and do far more harm than 
good. By his estimate, we should be destroying every bird in the world 
right now before we all perish in a pool of pathogens.

Webster's statement is the latest Hitchcockian pronouncement about H5N1 
bird flu, a virus that is deadly in birds. But humans are different. We 
are protected by a species barrier, and serological surveys conducted in 
1997 in Hong Kong and since have detected antibodies in thousands of 
humans who never got sick, showing that bird flu isn't as deadly to the 
few who come in contact with it as has been reported.

In fact, the growing immunity to H5N1 worldwide may lessen the outbreak 
in humans even if the dreaded mutation does occur. As time passes, the 
chances of this mutation appear less rather than more likely. (The 
Spanish flu, by comparison, mutated before killing a lot of birds.)

If H5N1 takes hold in pigs and exchanges genetic material with another 
flu virus, the result is likely to be far less deadly. The swine flu 
fiasco of 1976 is an example of the damage that can be done from fear of 
a mutated virus that can theoretically affect us. More than 1,000 cases 
of paralysis occurred from a rushed vaccine given to more than 40 
million people in response to a pandemic that never came.

Why provoke the public to see a potential pandemic in end-of-the-world 
terms? A pandemic simply means people in several areas having a disease 
at the same time -- but it may be hundreds rather than millions. The 
last flu pandemic, in 1968, killed 33,800 Americans, which is about the 
flu's toll in an average year. We don't need to panic in advance for 
that kind of pandemic.

Cooking poultry kills any flu 100 percent of the time, yet the fear of 
H5N1 bird flu is already so out of control in Europe that 46 countries 
have banned French poultry exports after a single turkey was found to be 
infected. France, fourth in the world in poultry exports, is already 
hemorrhaging more than $40 million a month.

Imagine what would happen if a bird in the United States gets H5N1 bird 
flu. At the rate we are going, the fear of birds will be so great that 
our own poultry industry, number one in the world, is likely to be in 
shambles. We already have this problem with mad cow disease, where a 
single sick cow that is not even in the food chain makes people very 
nervous, despite the fact that it is almost impossible to get mad cow 
disease from eating beef.

Flu is worthy of our concern. But concern can lead to long term 
preparation whereas panic can be far more virulent and costly than the 
bird flu itself.

Dr. Marc Siegel, associate professor of medicine at NYU School of 
Medicine, is author of ''False Alarm: The Truth About the Epidemic of 
Fear."

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/17/the_cost_of_bird_flu_hysteria/
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