BMJ Editor Condemns Scare Mongering Over Bird Flu

Main Category: Bird Flu / Avian Flu
Article Date: 29 Jun 2007 - 1:00 PDT

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In this week's BMJ, Deputy Editor Tony Delamothe attacks the continued scare mongering over bird flu.

Somewhere, I imagine, there's a small group of people proud to be counted among the Friends of Avian Flu, or FAF for short, he writes. I suspect they have a catchy mission statement, such as "Keeping the nightmare alive," and lapel badges of vaguely bird-like shape.

Their challenge is to keep bird flu forever in the public eye. This should be getting harder, as influenza H5N1 is proving particularly resistant to undergoing the killer mutation that would allow efficient human to human transmission of the virus.

Ten years after the strain first appeared in humans, it has killed just 191 people, despite millions of people and poultry living in very close proximity in South East Asia. Although these deaths are a tragedy for the victims and their families, it's well to remember that a similar number of people die on the roads world wide every 84 minutes, he says.

Traditionally, we've blamed the drug companies for talking up the risks of diseases, or even inventing diseases, but this is not the case with bird flu. The track record of oseltamivir (Tamiflu) as a treatment for H5N1 is decidedly mixed. Yet FAF, he says, has incorporated this pharmaceutical failure into its story: for bird flu, The Drugs Don't Work. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

FAF also knows that the best way to generate column inches is high profile scientific conferences with well oiled media machines, and this week's BMJ reports some of the familiar observations from a conference, such as the inevitability of the pandemic and the possibility of drug resistance. But others, he says, were relatively new: the terminological mutation from "avian flu" to "pandemic flu," in recognition of H5N1's failure to mutate genetically.

While H5N1 had been groomed for stardom, the story has shifted: now any influenza strain can become pandemic, with further details unknown, he says.

As influenza pandemics occurred in 1918, 1957, and 1968, another one is likely. But, he asks, why should we be any more worried in 2007 than in 1997 or 2017? Couldn't those responsible for planning the next pandemic do their planning a little less publicly and put the frighteners on the rest of us at the appropriate time?

"Editor's Choice: FAFfing about"
http://www.bmj.com

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