Mirabile Dictu. How could it happen?!? I actually agree with something in the New York Post! Maybe this is The End Times after all.
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Dr. Marc Siegel, described as "an associate professor of medicine at the NYU School of Medicine and author of 'False Alarm: The Truth About the Epidemic of Fear'", wrote an op-ed piece that appeared in yesterday's Post pooh-poohing all the hype we have in recent days heard about "avian flu" (ABC News's preferred term) / "bird flu" (NBC News's preferred term). He reminds us of the fear that media generated about SARS 2½ years ago when SARS traveled by jet from China to Toronto, a mere hop-skip-and-jump from us. Who knows? Maybe all those traitorous film producers and movie stars making movies in Canada to save money at the expense of American little guys whose jobs are given to Canadians who work cheaper, would contract SARS and bring it back to the good old U.S. of A. Didn't happen — tho I for one would be delited to see thousands of the scumbags who export American jobs die from a plague of foreign origin. That would be poetic justice indeed.
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Media are now speaking of avian flu as practically a guaranteed worldwide pandemic, tho that is very far from the case. As Siegel says:

The hysteria comes in when we assume a deadly mutation must occur — when it hasn't, and is unlikely to any time soon.

Mutations do of course sometimes occur that permit a microbe specific to one species to jump to another and thence from individual to individual within that second species. But it doesn't always happen, and in fact may be quite rare. After all, how many people do you know who have developed distemper?
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Siegel points out what many others have observed, that people are concatenating unrelated disasters into a generally fearful outlook that gives rise to exaggerated concerns about bird flu.

FEARMONGERS are having a field day lumping bird flu together with other deadly disasters. Dr. Shigeru Omi, the World Health Organization's regional director for the Western Pacific, recently said, "Even if you control avian flu, the next one is coming . . . I think it is similar to tsunamis and earthquakes . . . we do not know when."

We have had a lot of natural disasters of late, and some fool (Jeffery Taubenberger) recently reconstituted the 1918 Spanish flu virus that killed 50 million people worldwide in 1918, a story that not only made headlines that worried a lot of sensible people but actually won for that idiot honor as ABC's "Person of the Week" for his insane 'achievement'. Scientists justified this astoundingly irresponsible act by saying that they needed to understand how that virus worked to predict how other dangerous viruses, such as avian flu, might work. That is just plain crazy. One virus is not interchangeable with another, and lessons learned from one virus might have little or no relevance to fiting another.
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They utterly ignored the hazards of resurrecting a deadly microbe known with certitude to have killed massive numbers of people in many countries.

The public health risk of resurrecting the virus is minimal, U.S. health officials said. People around the world developed immunity to the deadly 1918 virus after the pandemic, and a certain degree of immunity is believed to persist today. Also, in previous research, scientists concluded that modern antiviral medicines are effective against Spanish flu-like viruses.

Oh? Do all countries have such antiviral medicines at the ready? Do all hospitals and doctor's offices across even the U.S. have such medications in abundance? Do scientists ever make mistakes, such that these scientists might simply be (you should pardon the expression) dead wrong?
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Let's examine one error in scientific judgment, which gave us Africanized bees. The Encyclopedia Smithsonian sums it up:

In 1956, some colonies of African Honey Bees were imported into Brazil, with the idea of cross-breeding them with local populations of Honey Bees to increase honey production. In 1957, twenty-six African queens, along with swarms of European worker bees, escaped from an experimental apiary about l00 miles south of Sao Paulo. These African bee escapees have since formed hybrid populations with European Honey Bees, both feral and from commercial hives. They have gradually spread northward through South America, Central America, and eastern Mexico, progressing some 100 to 200 miles per year. In 1990, Killer Bees reached southern Texas, appeared in Arizona in 1993, and found their way to California in 1995. ...

Damage done: Africanized Honey Bees (=Killer Bees) are dangerous because they attack intruders in numbers much greater than European Honey Bees. Since their introduction into Brazil, they have killed some 1,000 humans, with victims receiving ten times as many stings than from the European strain. They react to disturbances ten times faster than European Honey Bees, and will chase a person a quarter of a mile. Other concerns with Africanized Honey Bees are the effects on the honey industry (with an annual value of $140 million dollars) and general pollination of orchards and field crops (with an annual value of 10 billion dollars). Interbred colonies of European and Africanized honey bees may differ in pollination efforts, be more aggressive, excessively abandon the nest, and not survive the winters. Further, beekeepers may not continue their business of honey production if faced with aggressive bees. The packaged bee and queen rearing industries are in the southern United States, which would affect the honey industry across the continent.

Note that the scientific intent was to increase honey production, but the result has been exactly the opposite. Bees Online adds:

Large numbers of them may sting people and livestock with little provocation. [So add to human deaths the death of unknown numbers of cows, calves, horses, and other animals, including beloved pets.] They also "take over" European colonies by entering them and killing the resident queen. Because of these bees' noxious behaviors, many beekeepers abandoned beekeeping[.]

Should we compare mere agricultural researchers with the exalted scientists at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology? Why not?
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Science fiction writers have tried, for generations, to warn people about the risks of stupid projects and careless disregard for hazards. Perhaps the most famous fictional case is that of HAL 9000, the computer in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey that was given independent decision-making by artificial-intelligence scientists, and which decides to kill the crew of the mission it is meant to serve. Perhaps the most famous cases of real-life scientific disregard for human beings are the creation of nuclear weapons and the activities of World II medical experimenters Josef Mengele (Germany) and Unit 731 (Japan). There are good reasons to be afraid of scientists as much as of the things they investigate.
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But the multiple natural and human disasters that have of late befallen us — the Indian Ocean tsunami, hurricane Katrina, devastating increases in energy costs, deadly flooding in the Northeast, this past week's Indo-Pak earthquake — should not be lumped together to make us fearfully inclined to see as inevitable a worldwide bird-flu pandemic that will kill 150 million people. We do, of course, need to take reasonable precautions, as, for instance, improving the rate at which vaccines are created and manufactured (the latter which matter Siegel addresses). But media need to dial down the volume on their shrill and irresponsibly excessive disaster alarms. They are creating needless anxiety that serves no legitimate public purpose.
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(Responsive to "Flighty Flu Fears", opinion piece by Dr. Marc K. Siegel in the New York Post October 12, 2005.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,964.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 12:19 AM