[Mb-civic] Happy Doomsday to You! - Dana Milbank - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

Happy Doomsday to You!

Dana Milbank
The Washington Post
Friday, March 24, 2006; A02

Washington was about one horseman short of an apocalypse yesterday.

It began with a breakfast meeting in a Senate office building where, 
over fruit salad and bagels, government and academic experts discussed 
the coming avian flu pandemic. "Currently it has a fatality rate of 56 
percent," reported Nancy Cox, flu expert with the Centers for Disease 
Control and Prevention. "An increasing number of countries have reported 
human cases. The severe cases are really quite severe."

Pointing to slides of some nasty chest X-rays, she added: "Death from 
this particular pathogen is not a pleasant death."

Next: the mid-morning news conference on mad cow disease at the National 
Press Club. There, a beef producer explained why he is suing the 
government for not letting him test his cattle for bovine spongiform 
encephalopathy, an "invariably fatal, progressive, incurable, 
neurodegenerative disease" that can be transmitted to people. The feds 
say the testing is unnecessary, but the rancher, John Stewart, warned 
that "BSE is not understood enough today to really come to scientific 
conclusions."

For those who still had an appetite, there was a luncheon meeting of the 
National Economists Club at the Chinatown Garden restaurant on H Street, 
where Congressional Budget Office economist Bob Shackleton was 
explaining the "high-end" global-warming projections, which have Earth's 
temperature growing by five degrees Celsius -- nine degrees Fahrenheit 
-- this century.

"That five degrees centigrade is the equivalent of the change that 
happened since the end of the last glaciation 18,000 years ago to now," 
he told the economists as they munched on fortune cookies and orange 
wedges. "Eighteen thousand years ago, there was a mile of ice over New 
York City and you could walk 100 miles out into the ocean and still be 
on land."

Have a nice doomsday? Possibly. When President Bush went to Cleveland on 
Monday, a questioner asked him about a claim "that members of your 
administration have reached out to prophetic Christians who see the war 
in Iraq and the rise of terrorism as signs of the apocalypse. Do you 
believe this, that the war in Iraq and the rise of terrorism are signs 
of the apocalypse?"

"I haven't really thought of it that way," the president said. "The 
first I've heard of that, by the way."

But maybe not the last, if yesterday's collection of end-of-days 
warnings was any indication.

On the fourth floor of the Russell Building on Capitol Hill, public 
health experts were so perplexed by the bird flu that they had trouble 
setting up the presentation. The start was delayed for about 15 minutes 
as organizers debated where best to place the lectern (Q: "Where do you 
suggest?" A: "Where do you suggest?").

Once underway, the experts, assembled by the Center for Strategic and 
International Studies, displayed a number of slides, some frightening 
(675,000 Americans dead from the 1918 flu), some technical ("vestigial 
esterase E region"), and some merely drawings of ducks, geese, pigs, 
horses and seals. But the message was, as pathologist Jeffrey 
Taubenberger of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology put it, "we 
really don't understand a lot."

"If we take everything we know about influenza virology now, take 
everything I know about influenza virology now, and formulate a model of 
the next pandemic, it would look like this," Taubenberger said as he 
displayed a large question mark on the screen.

In fact, Taubenberger had evidence that the bird flu might have some 
difficulty mutating to a human form. But that did not entirely satisfy 
David Nabarro, the U.N. coordinator for influenza. "It's a very virulent 
and horrible virus," he said. "It has also moved into 20 countries 
during the last six weeks and I just checked the reports this morning: 
Overnight we have reports of it moving into the Gaza Strip and also 
moving into settlements in the West Bank."

Nabarro spoke of "mounting concern" across the world. "We are very 
vulnerable," he warned. "Most of us, I think, feel that it's best to be 
preparing to hunker down."

At the press club, John Stewart of Creekstone Farms Premium Beef was all 
done hunkering. Explaining his lawsuit against the Agriculture 
Department, he said the government wasn't testing enough animals for mad 
cow disease, so he wanted to do it himself. Stewart, just in from 
Kansas, said he was "surprised" USDA had cut back on testing. Sounding 
much like the influenza scientists, he said there are "question marks 
today about the science of this matter," and, besides, "consumers want 
the beef tested."

It was time for lunch in Chinatown. The CBO's Shackleton stood at a 
microphone stand in the middle of a room decorated by plastic and 
cardboard trinkets, as if delivering a toast to the economists assembled 
at banquet tables. There, the economist said something the Bush 
administration can't bring itself to say: "The problem of climate change 
stems mainly from the use of fossil fuels by human beings."

Shackleton said the likely temperature increase this century would be 
between one and five degrees Celsius, and the average rise in sea levels 
one to three feet. There is, he continued, "also the possibility of 
relatively abrupt shifts where the climate system could experience a 
dramatic shift."

The good news: We "won't be alive when most of the effects occur," he said.

The bad news: We all will have succumbed to bird flu and mad cow disease.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/23/AR2006032301783.html?nav=hcmodule
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