Flying Flu or Dead Duck?

Writing in the November 21st Weekly Standard, Michael Fumento says bird flu fears are overblown:

What we can say with confidence is that there is never such a thing as helpful hysteria. And the line between informing the public and starting a panic is being crossed every day now by politicians, public health officials, and journalists.

Officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have been handling numerous fearful phone calls from the public and the media, fielding questions about the safety of bird feeders and Thanksgiving turkeys. "It's been insane," spokesman Dave Daigle told MSNBC. In a recent Q&A session with Wendy Orent, science writer and author of the book Plague, a Nashville resident asked why "don't we just kill off all the domestic birds and poison the food on the migratory bird routes?"

Headlines like "Flu Pandemic Could Kill 150 Million, U.N. Warns" (Reuters) certainly haven't helped. Never mind that the figure was tossed off by a single official who provided a range of "5 million to 150 million." (Translation: "We haven't the foggiest.") Similarly, the media have generally morphed the federal government's leaked estimate of 200,000 to 1.9 million deaths to simply "1.9 million deaths." Also not helping is the media propensity to seek out the most alarmist "experts." . . .

[T]he winner in this grim game of one-upmanship is Dr. Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University, who claimed on ABC News's Primetime on September 15, "We could have a billion people dying worldwide."

When I later questioned him on this figure, he rather sheepishly admitted he meant to say "one billion ill." Quite a faux pas. But Garrett and Osterholm were on the same show, and neither made a peep to correct the misstatement. ABC used it as part of the introduction. "It could kill a billion people worldwide, make ghost towns out of parts of major cities, and there is not enough medicine to fight it," declared the somber voiceover. "It is called the avian flu." So the billion figure is out there and, no, this single article won't succeed in pulling it back. . .

The key question: What is the likelihood of either of these scenarios? Anybody who gives you an answer other than "No one really knows the risk," as Richard Webby says, is pulling your tail feathers. Webby is a virologist at the Department of Infectious Diseases, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis.

There are no pat formulas, such as the chances of shooting snake eyes or drawing a royal flush. Nor is it just a matter of time. Indeed, one of the arguments against a human outbreak of H5N1 is that sick birds have been mixing with humans for years now without producing a pandemic.

It's practically a state secret that the discovery of H5N1 in poultry dates back not to 1997 but rather to 1959, when it was identified in Scottish chickens. Perhaps haggis had a protective effect on the farmers, but there was a terrible outbreak of the related H5N2 among both chickens and turkeys in Pennsylvania in 1983-85 (17 million birds were destroyed) that appears to have originated as H5N1 in seagulls. So H5N1 has been flying around the globe for over four decades and hasn't done a number on us yet. That doesn't mean it won't ever; but there's absolutely no reason to think it will pick this year or next. . .

One panic button now being pushed repeatedly is that half of all persons contracting H5N1 die. "Right now in human beings, it kills 55 percent of the people it infects," Laurie Garrett told ABC's Primetime, on the same show that featured Redlener's billion-death prediction. By comparison, the Spanish flu is believed to have killed 2.5 percent to 5 percent of its victims. The typical flu death rate is less than 1 percent.

The cold-hearted reaction to these reports, paradoxically, is one of relief. A virus that kills its hosts so efficiently cannot easily propagate. (This is one of the reasons Garrett's predicted Ebola pandemic never materialized.) But in fact the reported mortality rate is problematic because of two types of "sample bias."

First, all avian flu deaths so far have occurred in countries with medical systems that are dismal compared with ours. Would you choose a Cambodian hospital to treat your flu? Second, that more or less 50 percent death rate comes from those ill enough to require medical attention--the sickest of the sick. Our experience with normal influenza is that many who become infected have no symptoms at all, nary a sniffle. So we know the numerator, but without the denominator it's useless.

This is a serious, supported piece. Read it all. Especially the cartoon:


(source: Weekly Standard subscription-only .pdf edition, page 27)