Weapons of Mass Distraction

While the world watches the warfare in the Mid East, and those on this side of the pond are focused on Fidel’s castrointestinal surgery, the threat of Avian Flu remains undaunted. This is the summer slow season for the virus, and so, pending dramatic events, the news has been swept from the public view, and we’ve been treated to a series of `good news’ reports on the bird flu front, designed to set our minds at ease.

Last week, it was a new vaccine, one that reportedly could be mass produced by next year. Of course, they admit the vaccine may not work, and `mass produced’ turns out to be in the tens of millions of doses, but hey, it sounds good.

This week, we are told the virus was unable to easily transmit between ferrets after being combined with a human flu virus. The heady assumption by the media has been that the likelihood of a pandemic is therefore decreased.

Perhaps, but it’s a big assumption.

According to a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), scientists working with the 1997 strain of the H5N1 virus, and a strain of seasonal flu, attempted to combine the two and come up with a hybrid to see how well it would transmit between mammals. They tested this `new’ virus on ferrets, and found it was no more easily transmissible than the H5N1 virus.

A laudable experiment, which has increased our knowledge of the H5N1 virus, but not quite what the media has portrayed. Presented here are a few of yesterday’s headlines:

New virus less than pandemic USA Today

Flu Viruses Don't Transmit Easily in Test KSL.Com

Mixed bird flu strain doesn't spread easily MSNBC

Bird Flu Pandemic May Not Develop HealthDay

I guess we can all go home now. The crisis is over. Guess we won’t need that vaccine now. After all, according to the lead paragraphs in many of these articles, a pandemic is now less likely.

Of course, read further, and Dr. Gerberding of the CDC cautions that we can’t draw that conclusion. This experiment was far from far reaching, and it used the 1997 strain of the H5N1 virus, a strain that doesn’t even exist anymore. Only one human influenza virus was used. And the technique was reassortment, where an entire segment of one virus was swapped with an entire segment of the other. This only one, of three ways that the bird flu virus might mutate to a pandemic strain.

While this experiment has value, and the knowledge we gain from this research may well help us in the fight against the pandemic strain, its importance has been overblown by the media.

No one would be happier to see some genuinely good news on the bird flu fight than myself. I’ve no desire to see a pandemic, and frankly, figure my chances of survival during one are less than comforting.

But media spin, faux good news, and apathy will not serve us during this crucial run up to a possible pandemic. We should be taking the threat seriously, and doing what we can now, while there is time, to prepare. While anything we do now will be inadequate during a pandemic, everything we can do, will help mitigate the effects.

To paraphrase an old saying: Man plans, and the virus laughs.

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