Much Ado About Bird Flu

Are You Still Worrying?

I’ve already put in my two cents worth about the total non-story that the possible “Bird Flu” pandemic is. You can read it here in my posting Buzzard Flu—Just More Media Static?

I still say that we really don’t need to spend much time worrying, but you won’t hear it from 99% of the stories in the main stream media. They just keep on hyping it endlessly.

Ironically I found a very good story in, of all places, Sunday’s Los Angeles Times, written by someone other than a dunderheaded news reporter. Author Wendy Orent seems to know more than a few things about how diseases can jump from birds to humans:

News reports make the threat even more ominous. In resurrecting the 1918 pandemic virus, the deadliest flu strain of all time, researchers recently learned that this strain was far deadlier than any other human virus — it killed mice, while normal human flu won't even ruffle a mouse's fur. They also found out that all of its genes came, directly or indirectly, from birds. Unlike the pandemics of 1957 and 1968, the 1918 version didn't arise from a combination of bird and mammal genes. Instead, the bird genes evolved into a human virus that killed as many as 50 million people.

This means, say breathless news reports, that what happened in 1918 could happen again, this time with H5N1. But Peter Palese doesn't think so. He is lab director at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, where the technique that re-created the 1918 genes — known as reverse genetic engineering — was developed. He and associate Adolfo Garcia-Sastre contend that what the resurrected virus really shows is how supremely adapted it is — how well its parts fit together, how perfectly it works. The sublime malignance of the 1918 virus doesn't lie in one part but rather in how the genes function together. Evolution shaped this virus to be a sleek, effective killing machine…

In nature, flu viruses in birds are intestinal diseases. Through feces, flu particles are deposited in water, where another duck or goose picks them up, gets infected and sheds the virus in turn. Wild-bird flu depends on mobile hosts to spread. If flu strains kill their hosts in the wild, the lethal versions will vanish. This is why evolution pushes wild-bird strains toward mildness.

To think that the 1918 flu started out as a harmless intestinal bird virus that jumped directly from its wild host into human beings and immediately turned into an explosive respiratory killer is to believe that hippos fly. Evolution doesn't work that way. The flu's genes came from birds, but it's what they did when they got into humans that matters...

The lesson here is that the flu virus, like all of life, is subject to evolution. Lethal diseases don't fall out of the sky. They evolve in the context of a host and that host's conditions of life. There is no sign, so far, that H5N1 is turning into a human disease — effectively spreading from person to person. Even if it does, it needs a Western Front to become more than ordinary.

See, I bet that you haven’t heard any of that before, particularly if you rely on the TV news and most newspapers.

So take off your gas mask and put away your tissues, everything's gonna be OK.