Friday, June 29, 2007

Friends of Avian Flu?

A year or so ago, you couldn't move for endless stories about how an epidemic of bird flu was coming. It would only be a matter of time before the virus mutated from one that could only be contracted by very close contact with animals to a rapidly spreading infection. The only thing left to do would be to count the bodies.

The pandemic never happened. While such an event is still a possibility, it doesn't look nearly as imminent as many were predicting. But there still seems to be a mini-industry trying to promote the idea that a pandemic is just around the corner, according to Tony Delamothe, deputy editor of the British Medical Journal.

Writing in today's edition, Delamothe says: 'Somewhere, I imagine, there's a small group of people proud to be counted among the Friends of Avian Flu, or FAF for short. 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. This is despite the most propitious of circumstances: 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 as well to remember that a similar number of people die on the roads world wide every 84 minutes.'

All of which is a reminder of the many scare stories that have been and gone in recent decades, from the heterosexual AIDS epidemic that would supposedly hit the UK in the 1980s (promoted as vigorously by gay rights campaigners as the moralistic Conservative government), through the threat of variant-Creutzfeldt Jakob Disease (vCJD) in the 1990s (which killed fewer people than the vanishingly rare older form of CJD), to bird flu today. That is not to trivialise the many deaths from AIDS. Some 60million people are now infected with HIV according to Delamothe and a vaccine is still a long way off. Yet, remarkably, it is far less of a story today than a disease - pandemic flu - which doesn't even exist yet.

Two lessons can be learned from all of this. Firstly, that there is a widespread, free-floating inclination to fear in modern Western society. The less concrete the fear and the more we can speculate about it in a way disconnected from reality, the more we seem obsessed by it. Secondly, we should be wary of any idea that plays upon this fear and which develops a network of professionals around it whose future material interests depend on maintaining public alarm about that idea. As Tony Gilland notes this week on spiked, just such a network has been created and accepted in relation to global warming, embodied in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). We should maintain a critical and sceptical attitude to the pronouncements of any such network.

FAFing about, BMJ, 29 June 2007

spiked-issue: Bird flu

Monday, June 18, 2007

John Pilger: secretary of the Hugo Chavez Fan Club

I've written a review of John Pilger's The War On Democracy. I think Pilger's heart is in the right place when he criticises America's interventions in Latin America. But he's never been strong on political analysis, tending to put a tick where America puts a cross. That doesn't really explain what's going on, which is a pretty big problem if you put your faith in any individual like Hugo Chavez.

How the left is living off Latin America