The pay's probably nothing to brag about, but I guess somebody's got to do it.

Actually, according to current plans, you'll most likely be in one of the first group of people to receive courses of either Tamiflu or Relenza from stockpiles. So even though your possibility of exposure may be higher (I guess?) you're also probably on the short list for the best defense they have at the moment.

Excellent post Arney. I was hoping to stir the pot some with the link about the bird flu being overhyped.

I wouldn't really call Michael Fumento a contrarian as much as a mythbuster. Let's face it, the MSM feeds us a lot of b.s., especially junk science. I've learned to be very skeptical of what I see on tv or read (news or internet sites). The truth always seems to be in the middle somewhere, usually hiding out of shame. <img src="/images/graemlins/tongue.gif" alt="" />

I think your analysis of the references may have some validity, but I am still siding with Fumento on the overall level of danger. One comment of yours I did not understand was the bit about how we don't want mild cases of the disease. Are you saying that it is better (in the scheme of things) for the virus to kill it's host quickly, thereby slowing it's spread rather than just making people mildly sick but then passing on to more people, killing some of them? Doesn't then the regular flu fall into the "mild, therefore much worse" disease catagory?

In a nutshell, I agree a pandemic is likely at some point, but I not overly concerned about it coming from the current bird flu.

-Blast

Excellent analysis/information.

Congratulations, Blast (and now to Duke, I just noticed)! <img src="/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" /> I'm glad that someone actually read through that admittedly very, very long post and thought about what I wrote.

There's two aspects about all this pandemic stuff--what's the potential effect, and what's the likelihood that a pandemic occurs.

Again, just talking about H5N1 only since Fumento only talks about this one strain, I think it's definitely more likely to become pandemic than it was in 1959 due to the changes that we have seen with the virus. His argument implies that H5N1 has been frozen in time since 1959. Not true. It's been slowly changing and taking on new characteristics, like gaining the ability to infect people. Like my board game metaphor, H5N1 has moved closer to the end, but how close are we to the final point of pandemic strain? <shrug> We don't know. Like Fumento said, anyone who says otherwise is just guessing.

But if we expand the question to what's the chance of any disease becoming the next pandemic, then no one has the foggiest idea. It's like waiting for the next Big Earthquake. Put this way--a more realistic question--I'd say the general anxiety about the likelihood of an imminent pandemic is way overblown and I think we're on the same wavelength on that point. I'm not buying any Tamiflu, extra N95 masks, or thinking about changing careers. I do disagree with the way Fumento interpreted what his sources were saying, even though I agree with him that the absolute probability of H5N1 going pandemic are unknowable. Then again, if I were a gov't official in Thailand or Vietnam and my citizens were dying and my economically important chicken-raising industry was being decimated, I would be very concerned, regardless of whether H5N1 ever goes pandemic or not.

So that's the likelihood question. But if we're talking about the potential effects, then I think there's decent evidence that H5N1 is currently a very lethal virus. There's not really any evidence that we're missing a whole bunch of asyptomatic or mild cases of H5N1 recently, so I think the estimated mortality is a fair estimate of the current lethality. The number could turn out to be incorrect in hindsight, sure, but there's no current hard evidence to say that it's much lower. I agree with Fumento that there is such a thing as sample bias, but based on what we know so far, I don't think that's really happening with the current H5N1 mortality estimates. These affected countries seem to be watching for cases very diligently and the limited blood analyses don't show many asymptomatic cases (basically none, for ones done in 2004-05), so I think the denominator is pretty accurate.

My "don't want milder cases" argument is a confusing one. Actually, I shouldn't have included the "...giving it more chance to spread to other people..." idea in my argument since that's not what I meant to say about H5N1. The "spreading wider" point is true if the disease is already easily transmissible among people, but H5N1 isn't. Scratch that. Too much typing yesterday to catch that.

But the changes I described in that paragraph suggest that the virus is becoming more adapted to human physiology. Evolutionarily speaking, a virus wants to happily coexist with its host as long as possible. By becoming more compatible with humans, it could mean that the virus needs a smaller genetic change from that point to become easily transmissible among people. A smaller change would mean a higher likelihood that it become an efficient transmitter, and if it could keep that 35% mortality rate of the north Vietnam strain (unlikely), that would be catastrophic. Of course, the virus could also be on its way to mutating into a more benign form or a form that no longer jumps the bird-human species barrier, but no one can know the outcome except in hindsight. But once a disease becomes easily transmissible, then of course, you'd want it to become milder, like regular flu. Or better yet, change into a form that doesn't infect people anymore. <img src="/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" /> Hopefully, that makes that paragraph make more sense.