The bird flu has the capability to develop into a pandemic. This is as opposed to the normal seasonal flu that comes around every year (and, yes, the seasonal flu does indeed kill a good number of people every year).
The reason behind the bird flu hysteria is that when it does infect a human being, the mortality rate is 50%. However, that is a strain of flu that is
very hard for a human to catch. I've read analysis on other sites that suggest it is likely that the bird flu will become less lethal in order to become more highly transmittable between humans. The reason behind this thinking is that the bird flu has to mutate in order to become highly infectious, and the way a flu virus mutates is by combining itself with another flu virus. Chances are good that it would use a virus that is far less lethal to humans, and so the expectation is good that the resulting strain would be less severe than is the current avian flu.
Note that the overall mortality rate for the Spanish Flu (1918-1919) was 2.5% - 5%. This is considered the single most lethal flu virus that the world has ever seen. For the avian flu to mutate into a highly infectious form and then present with a mortality rate of anything significantly higher than 5% would be a profound bit of bad luck indeed. Note that the spanish flu was also a form of avian flu.
You can read more about the Spanish Flu
here.
From all of this, there's a couple of observations to be made:
- A new outbreak of an infectious form of the avian flu could indeed be a bad thing that would kill hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people in the US alone. Even so, the disease hardly spells the end of everything.
- Currently, the avian flu has not mutated into a highly infectious form. Unless it does so, you are highly unlikely to catch it unless you work closely with large flocks of birds (chickens, for example)
- The CDC and the WHO are on record as stating that a pandemic will hit again someday. This is hardly news. Pandemics have been with us ever since humanity domesticated animals. Just a price we pay for agriculture.
- IMO, the media has blown the current threat all out of proportion. The real threat to this country is the economic loss caused by slaughtering flocks of chickens and other domestic birds in an effort to halt the spread of the virus.
If the avian flu hits in an infectious state, you can expect the resulting panic and quarantines to result in the state of affairs that many "survivalists" think about. That is, wide-spread civic unrest as shortages hit nation wide. Things could get dicey for a while. Having the skills to retreat to the woods and stay far away from the big population centers may actually be a great way to ride out the pandemic.
OK, I've gone on about this long enough. Suffice to say that there's a lot of things I worry about in the world today (peak oil, global climate change, a bankrupt economy), but the bird flu isn't one of them. I'm not getting worked up about this until someone shows me that the thing has become highly infectious.
'Nuff said.
