Jan 24, 2006 - East Anglia Daily Times:
Bird Flu - It's coming, but don't panic
Migrating birds seem to be bringing H5N1, the dangerous form of Avian Influenza, ever closer to our borders.
This is worrying, it is probably only a matter
of time until the first human cases are confirmed within the EU,
and it is impossible to know where the virus will appear next.
While we all wish bird flu would just go away
that is not going to happen.
The outbreak in Turkey, while tragic
for the families of the four children who are known to have died,
has provided European experts with a first opportunity to monitor
the virus at first hand.
This is important as it is tremendously
difficult to find out simple facts about individual viruses.
For
example, how many people have got it? We don't know because some
of the children who have tested positive for H5N1 don't show any
symptoms of being ill. So if you can have the virus and not even
realise it there might be hundreds of people happily going about
their daily lives with this "killer virus".
But if many people have it and are not dying
(less than 20% of cases in Turkey have proved fatal - no one who
has been treated in the early stages of illness has died) then
why are we so scared?
We are scared because we don't know what is going
to happen.
As the H5N1 strain of Bird Flu has spread west
from Asia it has not behaved as scientists expected it to.
Unable
to see into the future a lot of people have started looking into
the past to see what can be learnt from previous epidemics.
Learning
from history is not an exact science, it works better for politics
than it does for diseases because people change less down the years
than viruses do.
On the one hand the fact that the virus seems
to be becoming less deadly must be a good thing.
Maybe this whole
furore will turn out to be another Millennium Bug - potentially
terrifying but actually nothing really happened.
Or it could be
like 1917 when a mild form of a bird flu virus caused little damage
across the world but then came back the next year in a mutated
form known as "Spanish Flu" and killed millions.
On Monday the man in charge of Public Health
for the European Union, Markos Kyprianou came to the European Parliament
to talk about what is being done.
Last week he was at a conference
in Beijing where $1.9 billion was pledged to restrict and curb
the spread of the virus and transmission between birds and humans.
This is a lot of money and it must be spent well.
It might not be enough, or it might be unnecessary.
Because no
one knows the public must make sure that those responsible are
doing all they can and I will continue to ask Mr Kyprianou and
the British Government to tell us what they are doing.
