Birdbrain Flu. Media and governments have gone absolutely out of their minds with wildly exaggerated fears about bird flu, and killed uncounted thousands of healthy birds to 'contain the contagion'. Crazy talk of a "global pandemic" that could kill 150 million people is circulating in every medium, and the onslaught against wild birds could produce new endangered species. I get the feeling that some people are prepared to destroy the entire category of life called "bird" all over this planet to stop this "global pandemic", even to the point of dispensing with four major food sources for the world's human population, the chicken, duck, goose, and turkey.
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What is the cause of his insane hysteria? 60 people in Asia have died of avian flu that jumped from birds to people, and no one has died from person-to-person contagion. So the total human death toll, since it was first noted in 1997, some eight years, is 60. Not 60 million; not 60,000. 60 individuals. In Asia, the continent that contains more than half the world's total population. So of 3.6 billion people, 60 have died of avian flu. No sane person would go hysterical over so utterly unimportant a death rate: 1 in 60,000,000.
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The pandemic we really need to fear is stupidity.
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Here, we finally have a justification for one of the stupidest things ever said, considering the context of the remark when first uttered in 1933: "We have nothing to fear but fear itself."* The U.S. was in the depths of the Great Depression. Tens of millions of people were suddenly unemployed, banks were failing, homes were being foreclosed in huge numbers, millions of people had lost their life savings, there was no governmental safety net and private charities were in well over their head. Fascism had already taken over Italy; Communism was making a play for the American intelligentsia; Nazi and Japanese imperialism were on the horizon. There was plenty to fear, then. So when it was said, and during the decade in which it was constantly repeated, the assertion was just plain nuts. Here, however, it makes perfect sense.
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You can't get bird flu, or any disease, from healthy birds. Killing healthy birds by the millions is insane and evil. What if we took the same approach to controlling contagion in human populations? One person in a village gets a deadly, contagious illness. Should we kill him and everyone else in the village? everyone in a small town? a city? an entire state? country? continent?
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Why on Earth are they killing thousands and thousands, even millions of healthy birds? That inexcusable, monstrous evil, born of stupidity and hysteria, has got to stop.
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It's time to drop the alarm about avian flu by at least 99%. Work on sensible and morally defensible measures such as vaccinating domesticated fowl and people but stop the mindless slaughter.
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* Well, that's the way most of us remember the saying, but the exact quote from Roosevelt's first inaugural address is actually, "So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance."
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,976.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:38 PM