The Bird Flu Pandemic was a no-show. Tthe Swine flu is failing to live up to the hype--but don't un-pucker your sphincters yet. It could still mutate into a killer pandemic and wipe out all humanity. Be afraid. Be very Afraid.

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     Do you remember the Great Bird Flu scare of 2005-2006?

 ·        “A leading scientist warned yesterday that the avian flu virus is on the point of mutating into a pandemic disease and says that current estimates that such a pandemic could cause 7.5m deaths may understate the threat. According to the WHO, within a few months of the pandemic 30 million people would need to be hospitalised, and a quarter could be expected to die.”-- The Guardian, 5/26/05

      There was no need to worry, though; because (then) President Bush read a 546 page book (or so the legend goes) about the 1918 “Spanish flu” outbreak during one of his extended vacations, and he returned to Washington with a plan to make a preemptive strike on the Bird flu before it could attack the Homeland (USA TODAY, 10/10/05) ...and if all the talk about Bird Flu happened to divert the media’s attention from his incompetent response to the Hurricane Katrina disaster--so much the better.

      Now, all the Bush Administration needed to do was make Americans afraid of a disease that had killed only 65 people on the other side of the world (from direct contact with diseased birds) and had shown no indication of person-to-person transmission.

      No problem. If they could spin a case for war out of non-existent WMDs and threats of mushroom clouds, it should be easy to scare Americans with a disease that threatens to kill anyone and everyone--besides; they had the full support of the pharmaceutical industry.

      So they rolled out their new product: a deadly Bird Flu Pandemic:

 ·        The likelihood of a human flu pandemic is very high, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt warned Monday as he sought Southeast Asian cooperation to combat the spread of bird flu.”--AP, 11/11/05

 ·        “...If such an outbreak occurred, hospitals would become overwhelmed, riots would engulf vaccination clinics, and even power and food would be in short supply...”--The New York Times, 10/7/05

 ·        “...David Nabarro, the recently-appointed senior United Nations system coordinator for avian and human influenza, told the media Thursday that deaths from bird flu could reach into the hundreds of millions.”--ABC News, 9/5/05

 ·        “Short of thermonuclear war, I have a hard time imagining anything in my lifetime that would be as horrible,”--Laurie Garrett, senior fellow for Global Health at the Council on Foreign Relations, ABC News, 11/1/05

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      Those were scary times. Do you remember how Bush’s Great Bird Flu Pandemic turned out?

      According to the WHO (4/23/09), there have been a total of 257 confirmed deaths resulting from Avian (Bird) Flu since 2003. To put that figure into perspective: More than 1,170 people died from lighting strikes in 2003; more than 750,000 children died of malaria in 2006; and the ordinary seasonal flu kills about 36,000 Americans each year.

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      Now we find ourselves in the midst of another deadly pandemic--the Swine Flu; ...and we are hearing the same kind of dire predictions:

 ·        “The question now is not whether people will die [of the Swine Flu], but whether it will be thousands, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands.”--Robert Madelin, the European commission’s most senior health official, The Sunday Times, 5/3/09

 ·        “The death toll of the H1N1 [swine flu] virus could reach 50 million – as high as the Spanish Flu of 1918, according to John McCauley, of the National Institute For Medical Research.”-- London’s Metro newspaper, 4/26/09 (the article was accompanied by a picture of Mexican police wearing masks and holding machine guns.)

 ·        “The latest crystal-ball decree (May 8, 2009) out of the World Health Organization and the Centers of Disease Control (CDC) is that 2 billion humans (one-third of Earth’s population) could be infected this fall and winter with the current swine flu virus or its genetic derivatives.”--Journal of Whole Food and Nutritional Health, 5/13/09

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      On April 29^th, the World Health Organisation (WHO) raised the global alert status to phase five, indicating that a pandemic, was imminent.

 ·        “It really is all of humanity that is under threat,”-- Margaret Chan, director-general of the WHO

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     Once again, the message got through:

 ·        “Intense media coverage of the swine flu has driven a pandemic wave of fear across our nation and world. Following the CDC's recommendations, people with a cough or a cold are staying home from work, some paralyzed by fear that they might die in the impending pandemic being predicted by newspapers and TV news programs around the world.”-- National Intelligence Examiner, 4/28/09

 ·        “The media machine did its job, the government handed over billions for more vaccines and vaccine technologies, and, of course, many of the sheep obediently put on masks and fearfully ran off to doctors to be tested. When this has run its course, bureaucratic agencies will be slapping themselves on the back, affirming that all the systems worked ‘as planned.’ They turned the crank; the world danced to their tune.”--Dr. Sherri Tenpenny, DO, NewsWithViews.com, 5/4/09

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     One of the first casualties of the swine flu outbreak was the notion that our government is capable of protecting us from deadly diseases by quickly detecting and containing them before they can spread.

 ·        “[N]o one was less alert than the disease controllers in Atlanta. According to the Washington Post, the CDC did not learn about the outbreak until six days after Mexico had begun to impose emergency measures.”-- Mike Davis, Guardian, 4/27/09

 ·        On April 6, 18 days before the WHO issued its alert, Veratect [a Washington state biosurveillance company] reported [and notified the CDC and WHO about] ...a strange outbreak of respiratory disease in La Gloria, Mexico, noting that local residents thought the outbreak was linked to contamination from pig breeding farms nearby.

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      The main difference between the Bush Administration’s Bird Flu scare and the current outbreak of Swine Flu is that this time there is actually a human influenza virus spreading around the world--though it has not turned out to be as deadly as advertised.

 ·        According to Wendy Barclay, chairwoman of influenza virology at Imperial College, London, the swine flu looks like a mild strain. It is an H1N1 virus, the same type as seasonal flu which circulates around the world every year and kills about 0.1% of those infected. --The Sunday Times, 5/3/09

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      But just because the current outbreak of Swine Flu doesn’t seem very deadly, we must never stop being afraid.

 ·        “CDC officials said the swine flu may seem to be mild now, but they worry the virus will mutate into something more dangerous.”--MSNBC, 5/14/09

      If that happened, the swine flu could come back in the fall and threaten “all of humanity”; or if the Bird Flu mutated into something that could quickly spread throughout the human population; or if the two viruses combined; or if pigs had wings--they could fly.

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      Obviously, I believe the Swine Flu threat is being hyped by the pharmaceutical industry to sell drugs, but I could be wrong. In that case, get lots of rest, drink plenty of liquids, and get well soon.

Authors Bio:

Mick Youther is an American citizen, an independent voter, a veteran, a parent, a scientist, a writer, and all-around nice guy who has been roused from a comfortable apathy by the high crimes and misdemeanors of the Bush Administration.