How bad is bird flu?

BE afraid. Be very afraid. Bird flu is rampaging across Europe as we speak, and it’s only a matter of time before it gets to North America.

As if that isn’t enough, the World Health Organisation (WHO) warned earlier this month that bird flu now poses a bigger challenge than AIDS. It revealed a death toll of 95 people to support this conclusion, a toll that increased to ‘almost 100’ last Friday.

Almost 100! That’s definitely reason for panic. Although more people have died in Iraq in the past week, bird flu is an unseen enemy creeping gradually across the globe. It could mutate at any point into a form that’s transmissible between humans, at which point the killer H5N1 virus would be spread by nothing more than a sneeze. Hence the fear.

But let’s have a look at past flu epidemics, imitate the WHO by comparing bird flu with AIDS, and see if there really is that much to be scared of.

History has taught us that flu pandemics can occur between three and four times each century, and the 20th was no exception. In the aftermath of the First World War, an outbreak of Spanish flu killed more people than the war did – about 40-50 million worldwide. This was followed by less severe flu pandemics in 1957-58 and 1968-69.

Most flu experts agree that another outbreak is imminent, and avian flu looks like it could fulfil that prophecy. At the moment it can only be caught from infected birds – but scientists fear that the combination of avian and human flu in a person could lead to a ‘supervirus’ which could be transmitted between people.

There’s that word again – ‘fear’. How much fear is really justified? A quick look at a current pandemic, that of HIV/AIDS, will give us the answer.

The WHO stated in its March 6 conference that bird flu would surpass AIDS in the challenge it poses to world health systems. Really? True, hospitals would be packed; line-ups at clinics would stretch around the block; it would be virtually impossible to quarantine all the infected people. But the WHO says a vaccine could be developed in as little as four months; not everyone would catch the virus; and of those who did, not everyone would die (for the 95 people who had died by the beginning of March, 80 more had caught the disease and then recovered).

Compare this to AIDS. There is no known vaccine or cure; the fatality rate is 100 per cent; and, while it isn’t spread like a cold, the infection rate is soaring (of all the countries with HIV/AIDS cases, only two did not report increases in 2005). Almost 5 million people globally were newly infected with HIV in 2005.

The pandemic has wiped out entire generations. Children are being brought up by their grandparents, or growing up on their own. Schools are teacherless; communities are doctorless; there is no one left to pass crucial farming methods on to the next generation, so people are starving. Infrastructure in the worst-affected areas is virtually non-existent. It has ravaged entire continents, but Africa worst of all.

Over a third of adults in Botswana are infected with the virus; the life expectancy there and in Swaziland is just 33 years. Almost two thirds of the world’s HIV infected population lives in sub-Saharan Africa (Kevin Kalasa, below, is one of them - he is 30 years old).

Of the people who are infected worldwide, only about 15 per cent have access to life-prolonging anti-retroviral drugs (ARVs) – in Africa it’s 11 per cent. The WHO declared this a global health emergency three years ago, and the situation has only got worse. Why have its priorities changed? Is HIV simply not newsworthy enough?

In the face of the AIDS pandemic, the bird flu scare seems insignificant. Back to history: the post-war Spanish flu epidemic was seen as the worst of the 20th century (killing 50 million people). But even if the bird flu problem reached these proportions, it couldn’t touch AIDS. Since the 1980s, 25 million people have died from the disease; in ten years’ time, this will have increased to about 65 million.

The fear of bird flu is greater than the fear of AIDS for one reason only: Westerners worry they’ll be affected. North America had just 18,000 AIDS deaths in 2005, compared to 2.4 million in Africa. The HIV/AIDS pandemic is seen largely as a developing world problem, and one that’s going to stay there.

Bird flu, on the other hand, migrates. In the remote likelihood that it does spread like wildfire throughout North America, we could find ourselves getting a little taste of what life is like right now in Africa. And we don’t like the sound of that at all.

Photos courtesy of Associated Press, IPG/Matrix, Radhika Chalasani