Hope - The Only Defense Against Bird Flu

If international terrorists make good their bluff and detonate a crude nuclear device, casualty figures almost certainly would run into the hundreds of thousands.

Thankfully terrorists do not yet have such expertise, but let's suppose some device does go off somewhere in the world. It will thankfully, again, be the last time that such a horror may unfold before us. Why? Because as was proven in last outrage at New York and Washington on September 11 2001, unprecedented synergy spawned from globalisation, yielded unparalleled co-operation among states to forestall more of such future attacks.

And that, whether terrorists understood it or not, provided the world with enough intelligence on their modus operandi; for us to hoist them with the very petard that they used against us.

So, from being the entire man-made crisis that it was - it only showed how much easier it was to defeat it (terrorism) with human ingenuity.

However, of the twin scourges - terrorism and bird flu - our better judgement tells us which almost invariably will fall by the wayside based solely on what we need to defeat it: intelligence.

'A flu pandemic is a bigger threat than terrorism', says Mr. Richard Falkenrath, who until recently served in the Bush administration as deputy Homeland Security advisor.

In fact, it is so big a threat that for the first time in living memory, nobody in the world is prepared or immunised to combat it, if and when it hits.

If a pandemic does strike, governments will mostly likely be observers, because to date, no nation – not even the United States - has been able to give expert advice to citizens on what to do in the event of an outbreak.

Though the world has steadily been stockpiling the two known anti-viral drugs, Tamiflu and Relenza – they are not vaccines, and by their very nature do not inspire confidence when the H5N1 virus mutates to make it transmissible from human to human.

So all we can do is hang threadbare on a vague hope, on a wing and a prayer, because for all that has been said about bird flu, we can only seek grace from providence that it does not mutate into a reprise of the disastrous Spanish flu of 1915.

In the Spanish flu disaster, viruses attacked deep within lungs destroying every tissue, literally causing a patient's lungs to drown. If the H5N1 virus does something similar, which it now appears likely that it is, it will take to the grave a largely disproportionate number of healthy young adults throughout the world, maybe well beyond the 150 million created by the Spanish flu catastrophe.

Even as all these prognoses are being made, the greatest mystery confounding us all, is the extent of exploration done to unearth and uncover the genesis of the crisis: China.

As the natural habitat of the influenza virus, China's rapid development leads collaterally to cause its forests and wetlands to shrink. This in turn causes migratory birds to gather closer to human habitation which can cause viruses to spread from species to species.

Growth in China has also caused an increase in the consumption of chicken, that by all accounts are slaughtered in the most unhygienic of ways.

'Every day, the chances that this virus or another such virus will move from one species to another grows,' says Laurie Garrett, author of the, The Coming Plague .

And also growing is the heightened sense of frustration over the paltry sums of money devoted to funding research and finding cures for the bird flu pandemic; as opposed to the huge outlays to fighting terror, which many subscribe, can be defeated by ideology and the use of soft power.

Another despondent note, is the total lack of a global governing body to monitor and deal with pandemics. More often than not, as evidenced when the outbreaks of AIDS, the Ebola virus and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) raged, most of the adopted measures tended to be cosmetic and ad-hoc. Funds for research after the passing of these epidemics simply stopped, and because they stopped, humankind is poorer for it, because funding knowledge itself stopped.

Though presently, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has 12 people in its flu branch, it nonetheless leads a hand-to-mouth existence, subsisting mainly on grants from governments.

For it to be a truly, effective body armed with powers to deal with the potentiality of pandemics created by the likes of bird flu, it needs to have laboratories and affiliated offices throughout the world, to clear the first wave of attacks coming from a pandemic.

But until and unless such initiatives are undertaken with gusto, and without any pussyfooting, our only line of defence against a Bird Flu pandemic is hope – hope that it will not mutate to become transmissible from human to human as happened with SARS.

Jaya Prakash lectures in journalism at the Beacon School of Technology. He can be reached at prakruby@pacific.net.sg