Bird flu — what to do?

Worldwide press and health officials are all a-twitter, fearing a pandemic if a strain of avian flu, H5N1, now spreading throughout Asia and Europe, mutates and makes the jump to human-to-human transmission.

That’s a spooky thought, especially since pandemics have plagued man for centuries and epidemiologists worldwide say we are overdue for another. There is no reason to believe because of our disease prevention technology that it cannot happen again.

Avian flu, aka H5NI, or “bird flu” — because it is cultivated and spread by a variety of bird species — first appeared in chickens in Hanoi, Vietnam in 1997. By 2003 millions of chickens were infected and destroyed throughout Asia.

The first human case of H5N1 also occurred in 1997 in Hong Kong; eventually 18 people were infected and six died. Since then, more than 100 people have been infected throughout Asia, which has resulted in 60 fatalities.

Similar to Black Death — the Bubonic Plague — a pandemic spread by fleas on rats that began in China in the 1300s and eventually killed over a third of the world’s population, there is no magic elixir or vaccine that positively will stop avian flu. The Bubonic Plague is still with us, but because of our understanding of how it is spread, it is no longer pandemic.

Drug companies have come up with a vaccine known as “Tamiflu” that may work, but when you consider that China alone has over 14 billion domestic fowl to vaccinate, the task of stopping the flu from spreading from Asia is monumental.

With the fluidity of man’s transportation that allows us to move around the globe (literally) overnight, the risk of a bird flu pandemic is probably real. When H5N1 suddenly appeared in Romania, thousands of miles from the original outbreak, world health scientists and epidemiologists began to look at the health ramifications to humans more seriously.

Many species of birds move about the globe as a normal part of their life cycle. Shorebirds, for example, regularly migrate between Siberia and Australia annually, passing over and through infected areas.

Waterfowl, osprey and other birds also migrate between Scotland, Europe, and Africa annually. Duck hunters harvesting waterfowl here at home at the Summer Lake Wildlife Management Area back in the ’50s came back to Bend with snow geese that had been banded in Russia.

According to virologist Dr. Hon Ip, head of United States Geological Survey’s (USGS) Diagnostic Virology Laboratory at the National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wisconsin, not all birds are equally susceptible to the flu virus. Avian influenza viruses are found more commonly in water birds (ducks and geese), shorebirds and gulls.

Birds such as sparrows and pigeons tend not to be as readily infected. There are several avian flu strains, but the most dangerous — because we know so little about it — is H5N1.

Sparrows are usually not found migrating great distances, as do waterfowl and shore birds, therefore the risk of spreading the disease is higher in waterfowl than songbirds and domestic pigeons. Therefore, birds frequenting our feeders around Sisters are no great threat to being infected with the Asian strain of bird flu.

World health and bird migration scientists initially anticipated that H5N1would spread from Southeast Asia to Siberia, eventually infecting migratory birds that travel to North America through Alaska. Since the summer of 2005, however, it appears the virus has spread toward Central Asia and into Romania and Turkey, not toward Siberia.

Dr. Ip states that the virus can survive in contaminated feces for almost a week at room temperature and up to three weeks in the cold. However, just simple warm soap and water are excellent deterrents to spreading the virus.

Bird flu is dispersed from bird-to-bird by contact with feathers and feces. Flies flitting from infected birds to humans could also become a vector.

To better prepare the United States for a possible worldwide outbreak of avian flu, President Bush has outlined a $7.1 billion strategy that would include $1.2 billion for enough vaccine to protect 20 million Americans against the current strain of bird flu.

The good news is that Thailand, where tens of millions of chickens have been destroyed, has driven the virus back into just a handful of provinces. Kumnuan Ungchusak, director of the bureau of epidemiology at the Thai Ministry of Health, said in an interview, “I believe we can contain the outbreak at its beginning … and avert a flu pandemic.”