Bird flu BS... and not BS
One thing that really ruffles my feathers are articles about bird flu and/or pandemic flu, published by respectable news organizations, sometimes written by supposed "experts", that give the public misleading or false information. The worst offenders are often people with specific agendas. I mentioned the other day how poultry farmers in this country sometimes tell us we're all safe from a pandemic because they've got good surveillance and containment of their chickens. (False, because a pandemic could start anywhere in the world.) Well, the "other side", the environmental and animal rights people, are just as unreliable. From the Guardian (UK): So who's really to blame for bird flu?
Grain's alternative theory for the emergence of H5N1 - which got backing in an editorial in the Lancet medical journal last month - starts with the observation that bird flu has coexisted pretty peacefully with wild birds, small-scale poultry farming and live markets for centuries without evolving into a more dangerous form of the disease.
No. No, it hasn't. This particular bird flu, H5N1, hasn't affected people until recently, but we had three flu pandemics in the twentieth century, and similar numbers in centuries before. All of them evolved from bird flu viruses. Bird flu hasn't coexisted pretty peacefully with us for centuries. It's periodically come forth and kicked our collective asses.
Either this author doesn't know this and is uninformed about the subject she's chosen to address, or she does know and is willfully misinforming the Guardian's readers to advance her agenda. And in doing so she's shooting herself in the foot with her better-informed readers. I'm not unsympathetic to her perspective - intensive farming of poultry may well contribute to H5N1's spread. But because of that glaring misstatement, I'm suspicious of all the evidence she produces. It galls me when I see people using bird flu to advance their own pet causes this way. PETA's been doing it too, saying bird flu is the revenge of the chickens for factory farming. It only leads me to suspect that these people don't appreciate the seriousness of bird flu, if they see it as an opportunity to advance a cause.
And that's the news media, which theoretically has editors and standards. In the blogosphere, flu info can be even dodgier. Monday some random guy posted in a blog about "confirmed" bird flu in Texas. He said his father's brother's nephew's cousin's former roommate wife's ex-husband's father had just been admitted to the hospital with it. The story was suspect from the get-go, full of holes: the patient had only just been admitted (no time for testing); the poster made no mention of H5N1 and didn't seem to be aware that there are other types; he didn't seem to know how many family members were Asian, and didn't say why that or a visit to an Thai market mattered; he responded with name-calling when commenters called the story terrible and false.
Of course, it was false. The sick guy had made up his own diagnosis, and had something completely different. I don't think anybody but him and relatives, particularly his ex-daughter-in-law's credulous husband, ever thought for a moment he did have it. Obviously it was completely irresponsible for him to post this way, but I'm guessing we'll be seeing more posts like it in the future, and they may not be so obviously false. (It's worth noting that even a real human H5N1 case in the U.S. still wouldn't necessarily mean the pandemic was upon us, unless it was spreading H2H efficiently.)
But part of the draw of such reports is that some amateur observers are growing more and more convinced that the WHO is not going to give the early warning should a pandemic emerge. It was widely noted after the recent Indonesian family cluster that, if this had been the start of a pandemic, WHO would have failed in responding to it, because it took them so long to get on top of the situation. But beyond that, some feel that WHO won't declare phase 4 until we're past phase 4, because of all the political and economic ramifications of doing so. So is phase 4 the new phase 6 (=pandemic)? Hard to say. The way they keep describing phase 4, it almost sounds like it. Such moving of the goalposts only encourages people to rely on unofficial and sometimes unreliable sources. (For more on how WHO works and why, see Revere at Effect Measure's recent series on the WHO.) And WHO's recent report that four Indonesian nurses with flu-like symptoms who'd treated patients with H5N1 were negative, when before we only knew of one nurse under observation, didn't boost people's confidence in WHO announcements.
I wish I could tell you that I thought Flublogia could step in and be Johnny-on-the-spot on this, telling us if a pandemic were imminent. Unfortunately, I'm not sure it can. We just aren't tapped in enough to what's going on in remote locations in China, Indonesia, Romania, or Nigeria. We know jack about what's going in in North Korea or Myanmar (Burma). The much-maligned WHO doesn't have the resources it needs to jump on every new suspect outbreak, and the testing simply takes too long at present. Plus there's the risk of a contagious person potentially flying to London, L.A., or Johannesburg, before anyone even knew they could be infected.
Could bloggers and flu watchers have the inside scoop, a bit of advance notice if TS were about to HTF when H5N1 became efficiently transmissible? (TSHTF=the shit hits the fan.) Possibly. If the outbreak stayed localized initially and the circumstances were such that we were seeing contemporaneous and reliable accounts as it was happening. But we might not.
It's hardly comforting, but I increasingly suspect that if a pandemic comes - and that is still an "if" not a "when" - we may not get any warning before it's here.
Grain's alternative theory for the emergence of H5N1 - which got backing in an editorial in the Lancet medical journal last month - starts with the observation that bird flu has coexisted pretty peacefully with wild birds, small-scale poultry farming and live markets for centuries without evolving into a more dangerous form of the disease.
No. No, it hasn't. This particular bird flu, H5N1, hasn't affected people until recently, but we had three flu pandemics in the twentieth century, and similar numbers in centuries before. All of them evolved from bird flu viruses. Bird flu hasn't coexisted pretty peacefully with us for centuries. It's periodically come forth and kicked our collective asses.
Either this author doesn't know this and is uninformed about the subject she's chosen to address, or she does know and is willfully misinforming the Guardian's readers to advance her agenda. And in doing so she's shooting herself in the foot with her better-informed readers. I'm not unsympathetic to her perspective - intensive farming of poultry may well contribute to H5N1's spread. But because of that glaring misstatement, I'm suspicious of all the evidence she produces. It galls me when I see people using bird flu to advance their own pet causes this way. PETA's been doing it too, saying bird flu is the revenge of the chickens for factory farming. It only leads me to suspect that these people don't appreciate the seriousness of bird flu, if they see it as an opportunity to advance a cause.
And that's the news media, which theoretically has editors and standards. In the blogosphere, flu info can be even dodgier. Monday some random guy posted in a blog about "confirmed" bird flu in Texas. He said his father's brother's nephew's cousin's former roommate wife's ex-husband's father had just been admitted to the hospital with it. The story was suspect from the get-go, full of holes: the patient had only just been admitted (no time for testing); the poster made no mention of H5N1 and didn't seem to be aware that there are other types; he didn't seem to know how many family members were Asian, and didn't say why that or a visit to an Thai market mattered; he responded with name-calling when commenters called the story terrible and false.
Of course, it was false. The sick guy had made up his own diagnosis, and had something completely different. I don't think anybody but him and relatives, particularly his ex-daughter-in-law's credulous husband, ever thought for a moment he did have it. Obviously it was completely irresponsible for him to post this way, but I'm guessing we'll be seeing more posts like it in the future, and they may not be so obviously false. (It's worth noting that even a real human H5N1 case in the U.S. still wouldn't necessarily mean the pandemic was upon us, unless it was spreading H2H efficiently.)
But part of the draw of such reports is that some amateur observers are growing more and more convinced that the WHO is not going to give the early warning should a pandemic emerge. It was widely noted after the recent Indonesian family cluster that, if this had been the start of a pandemic, WHO would have failed in responding to it, because it took them so long to get on top of the situation. But beyond that, some feel that WHO won't declare phase 4 until we're past phase 4, because of all the political and economic ramifications of doing so. So is phase 4 the new phase 6 (=pandemic)? Hard to say. The way they keep describing phase 4, it almost sounds like it. Such moving of the goalposts only encourages people to rely on unofficial and sometimes unreliable sources. (For more on how WHO works and why, see Revere at Effect Measure's recent series on the WHO.) And WHO's recent report that four Indonesian nurses with flu-like symptoms who'd treated patients with H5N1 were negative, when before we only knew of one nurse under observation, didn't boost people's confidence in WHO announcements.
I wish I could tell you that I thought Flublogia could step in and be Johnny-on-the-spot on this, telling us if a pandemic were imminent. Unfortunately, I'm not sure it can. We just aren't tapped in enough to what's going on in remote locations in China, Indonesia, Romania, or Nigeria. We know jack about what's going in in North Korea or Myanmar (Burma). The much-maligned WHO doesn't have the resources it needs to jump on every new suspect outbreak, and the testing simply takes too long at present. Plus there's the risk of a contagious person potentially flying to London, L.A., or Johannesburg, before anyone even knew they could be infected.
Could bloggers and flu watchers have the inside scoop, a bit of advance notice if TS were about to HTF when H5N1 became efficiently transmissible? (TSHTF=the shit hits the fan.) Possibly. If the outbreak stayed localized initially and the circumstances were such that we were seeing contemporaneous and reliable accounts as it was happening. But we might not.
It's hardly comforting, but I increasingly suspect that if a pandemic comes - and that is still an "if" not a "when" - we may not get any warning before it's here.