We're all going to die! Well, at least a third of us:
As of Tuesday, the World Health Organization reported 247 human cases, with 144 deaths. With a mortality rate thus far of 58 percent, the death toll is expected to be in the millions should the virus spread to the United States and around the world. At current mortality rates, it is estimated 35 percent of the population would succumb. That means more than 120,000 Allen County residents could die from the H5N1 virus, Allen County commissioner of health Dr. Deborah McMahan told the audience in IPFW's Walb Union Ballroom.
But, don't worry, there are steps you can take (from the county's Flu Task Force Web site): Stay home, wash your hands, cover your cough, get a flu shot. Yeah, that'll do it
Sorry, that was a bit of a cheap shot. Actually, this is one of those cases in which officials will be damned if they do, damned if they don't. If they spend enormous amounts of time, energy and money preparing for a disaster that never comes, they will be seen as alarmist fools. If they do nothing, or not enough, and the worst does happen, they will be forever reviled as callous villains.
The potential for widespread death is certainly there from the bird flu; this is at least as nasty as anything seen since the 1918 pandemic that killed so many millions. But if you start looking at all the qualifiers, a lot has to happen before the worst happens, including a mutation that allows easy human-to-human transmission. That hasn't happened yet, and it may not. And if it does, the only thing that will prevent all those fatalities is enough quantities of the right vaccine, which is, to say the least, problematical. There is not just the H5N1 strain mentioned in the story -- they're also working on a vaccine for another strain -- H571 -- that could be the breakout killer. Which strain will be the one, and will we have enough of the vaccine? And what if the strain mutates -- which is the nature of a virus -- so much that the vaccine is worthless?
About all local "preparedness" can do is try to figure out how to cope with the breakdown of civil structure and public institutions likely to come because of many deaths, much illness and a lot of fear and panic. If I had to make the call, I'd probably opt for as much advance planning as possible. Many of the steps we'd need to take for a pandemic are things we'd also need to do for other kinds of disasters. As we should have learned from Katrina, crazy things happen, and the best way to minimize their impact is to have a plan ahead of time that makes sense, even it quickly falls apart when it is needed.
As for the overall question of whether we're overreacting or not doing enough, I don't know. I suspect even people with more information than you and me are just making their best guess.
