Top Health News for 2005: Bird Flu Pandemic or Fear Pandemic?

It is somewhat ironic to note that the top health news for 2005 was the bird flu pandemic. Not the unveiling of the new, personalized food pyramid, not the Terri Schiavo saga, not the banning of Vioxx or Bextra, neither the advances in cloning and the related ethical dilemas... Not even the Medicare Part D program. Instead, a health hazard that has not yet claimed a single American life has made it to the top of health news for the entire 2005.

First, I want to make clear I have no intention to minimize the real danger of a flu pandemic. I do believe that the threat is real, and I don't think the mortality estimates are exaggerated.

What caught my interest, though, is the impact a disease yet to be has already had on our society. There was hardly any news program in the last 3 or 4 months that has not featured the bird flu pandemic. A Google search for "bird flu" returns no less than 23,800,000 entries... Exotic places like Caraorman in the Danube Delta have made it to the world scene when domestic birds there were found to be infected with the feared H5N1 influenza virus...

There is no bird pandemic yet, and I hope we won't have one. But there certainly is a fear of bird flu pandemic raging all over the world. And what fuels it is our realization that we may be confronting a disease capable of spreading easily from person to person and continent to continent, with a high mortality rate, especially among the young. A disease we have no vaccine and no safe treatment against. A disease apparently able to defy all the advances of modern medicine and technology.

The the bird flu pandemic fear is similar in some ways to the fear patients with terminal illnesses experience: you can't do much about it. And you can't ignore it, either: it keeps coming back to you, one way or another.

It makes us more aware of our frailty.

The Avian Flu Doc