Bird flu scenario dire, says expert Huge death toll, global panic likely

BAR HARBOR – It’s beginning to look like when, not if, planning should begin for a bird flu epidemic, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist told a full house Wednesday at Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory.

That kind of epidemic could throw the planet into chaos, said Laurie Garrett, a health and science journalist who is a senior fellow at the Council for Global Relations.

“The likely death toll would dwarf all but thermonuclear threats,” she said.

The recently emerged flu strain that’s more officially known as H5N1 came from densely populated Guangdong, China, in 1996 or 1997. It’s a type of flu that has never circulated among human beings, Garrett said.

Humans’ utter lack of immunity to the strain is one reason the lethality rate is 55 percent. That number dwarfs the rate from the last devastating flu pandemic in 1918, which had 2 percent lethality and still killed more than 55 million people.

The two strains, which both developed from wild birds, share something else: They are most fatal to the young and vigorous.

“It is more dangerous to be young and healthy, because you have a stronger immune system,” she told the crowd.

Once attacked by the flu virus, the immune system fights back. Because of the many and vicious symptoms of the disease, the immune system might fight back a little too hard, according to Garrett.

“The lungs become collateral damage,” she said.

In addition to the high lethality rate of the virus, there are more reasons to be alarmed, Garrett said.

It’s a difficult, slow process to develop flu vaccines. If the H5N1 virus mutates so that it easily can be transmitted from person to person, time will be a scarce resource as people gear up to protect themselves against it.

The speed of jet travel means that the virus could move much faster than the vaccine can be developed. Even if a vaccine can be developed in time, she said, the U.S. doesn’t have a good track record in distribution – unlike Europe, which gets a lot of vaccines to its citizens.

Containment of an outbreak would not be possible, she said, and culling domesticated birds in an effort to avoid the spread of the disease has not been effective.

Garrett, who has won the Pulitzer, Polk and Peabody prizes for reporting, reminded her audience that Europeans “have another institution we don’t have,” she said, “national health care.”

Another problem is that, in general, the U.S. is poorly prepared for an epidemic.

A flu plan for New York City estimated that there might be 280,000 hospitalizations and 12,000 to 114,000 deaths. These numbers do not reflect the virus’s 55 percent lethality rate, Garrett said.

“But there’s only 28,000 hospital beds,” Garrett said. “Where do those patients go?”

Worldwide panic caused by a pandemic also would mean that the global delivery system would grind to a halt, she said, which wouldn’t be good for the American consumer.

“We have globalized our consumer system, we have globalized our food system,” she said. “We would find ourselves isolated from our chain of production.”

The panic would affect Americans in other ways, she said, as citizens from poor nations likely would attempt to enter wealthy states illegally in search of drugs or vaccines.

Garrett saw some of this panic firsthand, as she was in China during the SARS outbreak. She described being stopped an average of 12 times a day to be checked for fever. She spoke of dangerous rumors that flew around the country by text messages that were believed more readily than the official news dispersed by the government.

“Though they never actually declared martial law, it was martial law,” Garrett said.

In terms of what ordinary Americans can do to prepare – or attempt to prevent – a devastating global pandemic of bird flu, Garrett said people should focus close to home.

“Think global and act local,” she said. “What is the nature of your community? Who would be in charge? And who do you know in your neighborhood who would need your help?”