sunday times: bird flu

When bird flu (avian influenza H5N1) first hit the news a year or so ago, I felt that the likelihood it could mutate and become a pandemic was slim.  My interest in history, more than disease, led me to read The Great Influenza by John Barry. It was a fascinating book, resulting in much forehead-slapping as I read of the sweeping spread of this flu outbreak, which killed 50 million people, aided by an ignorance of how influenza mutates, troop movements and housing in WWI, and the powerful political climate of the era (whap! "If only they had known..."  whap! "How could they keep on...").  I didn't think something like this could happen with avian influenza.

For instance, today, we have a much more thorough understanding of viruses.  But as time went on, I realized that there are two elements in place today that are similar to the facilitating factors of 1918.  Instead of shipping soldiers all over the U.S. and Europe, spreading the flu, we have a global economy, with millions of people flying international flights every month. And we still have the influence of politics.  There are growing economic ties between the U.S. and Asian countries, including Vietnam, where most deaths from bird flu have taken place and where the most frightening signs of mutation are occurring, and China, where bird flu has resurfaced, but which has has a record of being less that transparent regarding bird flu cases both in 2004 and as recently as last week. It was a little more than a year ago that SARS crippled China's tourism and economy, and one cannot discount the motivation to deny another outbreak of a highly contagious, often fatal, disease.  In Thailand, agribusiness has been accused of a cover-up and influencing politics regarding bird flu.

The current issue of the journal Nature focuses on avian influenza and the "incoherence in the world's response to a potential human pandemic." It provides a series of excellent free access articles, an archive of past articles, and links.  This issue was brought to my attention in the blog Resilience Science, via a recommendation from Jon Christensen at The Uneasy Chair. 

Please read this excellent coverage.  I no longer think a pandemic is out of the question.  The Nature editorial states: "Unless the international community now moves decisively to mitigate this pandemic threat, we will in all probability pay heavily within a few years."

There is also lots of information on avian influenza at Effect Measure, a public health blog (read especially posts on bird farms) edited by epidemiologists.

Comments

[Aydin]

In the same issue of Nature there is an essay by Sean Nee (The great chain of being), where he discusses the evolutionary positions of humans and the bacteria and ends with the following paragraph:

"One of the huge species, Homo sapiens, got remarkably self-important. But when, to his surprise, a virus wiped him out, most life on Earth took no notice at all."

Let's hope that virus isn't here yet.