Bird Flu

Bird flu has been all over the news lately. I'm trying to decide exactly how worried I should be.

News reports will, of course, tend to emphasize the imminent danger. That's what sells newspapers, and that's what people "want" to hear. "Nothing to see here" just doesn't capture anyone's attention.

For example, recent reports about research on the 1918 flu strain suggest that it was very similar to today's bird flu, the implication being that the bird flu could be just as deadly this time around. But lest anyone forget, after killing tens of millions of people, the 1918 virus disappeared completely. So completely that researches had to exhume old corpses in order to find virus samples to work with.

That suggests an alternate interpretation: that the 1918 strain killed pretty much anyone susceptible to that particular virus. Anyone alive today may have inherited some natural immunity. Do I trust my life to that notion? Of course not, but you never hear about the possibility of natural immunity in the media, even though the idea seems at least as plausible as the possibility that the same virus released today would be just as bad or worse as the last time around.

Similarly, you hear a lot of prognostications about how quickly the virus would spread globally in an era of air travel. But SARS was fairly contagious yet didn't turn into a global pandemic, thanks in part to quick action from health authorities. Would bird flu be like the 1918 pandemic, or like SARS? We don't know the answer to that question.

But we do know that pandemics of various diseases occur once every generation or two throughout history. The last one was in 1968 (the Hong Kong Flu), and was the third influenza pandemic in the 20th century (there was also a cholera pandemic). There will be a global pandemic sometime in the future, possibly the near future, and there will be a pandemic after that and a pandemic after that.

Rather than obsessing about the current strain of bird flu (which might or might not turn out to be a major killer), it seems more prudent to think about common-sense ways to deal with pandemics generally.

Stockpiling Tamiflu, for example, might help if the next pandemic is bird flu (or it might not: Tamiflu is not effective against all strains of bird flu). But Tamiflu will do you absolutely no good if the next pandemic is ebola, Lassa fever, or some other disease.

But telecommuting could significantly improve your survival chances no matter what form a pandemic takes, since it would significantly reduce your exposure to other people. And with gas hovering around $3/gallon, telecommuting is attractive for other reasons.

On a local and national scale, efforts may be best spent on general health measures, such as making sure hospitals have enough excess capacity for an outbreak, and quarantine plans are in place. Money spent there will be helpful in a wide variety of scenarios (including natural disaster and bioterrorism) instead of just the one scenario of bird flu.

I've heard predictions of all sorts of amazing gloom-and-doom in the case of a bird flu pandemic. Cities running out of food as truckers refuse to drive trucks into "plague cities." Power plants going offline when the engineers die. That sort of thing. I don't believe it for a minute.

There have been pandemics of that magnitude in recorded history, where the disease disrupts the social order (the black death comes to mind), but they are very rare. We also know far more about sanitation and health care than we knew back in the 1300's. And those of us fortunate enough to live in a wealthy, developed nation have access to infrastructure and services which will help us identify, slow, and survive a pandemic.

Will there be another global pandemic? Yes. Perhaps even a major killer like the 1918 influenza.

But like most such natural disasters, it seems that the people most likely to be affected will be the poor and residents of less developed countries. Wealthy residents of wealthy countries will, for the most part, watch from a distance and worry.