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On Monday, Foreign Policy magazine unveiled its list of “The Top Ten Stories You Missed in 2006,” a sampling of “the news that remained under the radar” this year.
Number 9 caught my eye: “What’s Worse Than Bird Flu? The Cure.”
“In 2006, bird flu didn’t become the killer pandemic everyone feared. In fact, there were no confirmed deaths in developed countries from bird flu. But the alarm, stoked by Western media reports, led to an unexpected — and unfortunate — outcome: A rash of abnormal behavior, hallucinations, and even deaths attributed to Tamiflu, the medicine marketed as a key drug capable of fighting the disease,” explained the magazine. Foreign Policy pointed to the suspicious deaths of 10 Canadians who took the drug, and noted that the U.S. FDA “received more than 100 reports of injury and delirium among Tamiflu takers for a 10-month period in 2005 and 2006.” Its conclusion: “For now, the cure seems worse than the disease.”
It’s a novel argument, to be sure, but one that merits a closer look.
It’s true that bird flu has not led to a “killer pandemic” this year — but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen next year, or the year after that, or five or ten years down the road. Back in September the Associated Press reported that “The risk of a flu pandemic remains high despite possible public fatigue with the issue,” with Richard Nesbit, a top WHO official for the western Pacific, saying this: “The virus seems to be very embedded in the environment and, in our view, the risk of a pandemic continues unabated.” Nesbit added: “After three years now, I’m sure that many journalists and the public are starting to get tired of the same message that there’s a potential global pandemic around the corner, but we have a responsibility to continue to give this message.” While media attention to the issue has dropped off, the threat has not passed, or lessened.
FP‘s second point — the absence of “confirmed deaths in developed countries from bird flu” — is also, regrettably, immaterial. If bird flu sparks a human influenza pandemic, that pandemic will likely begin in Asia, then quickly spread around our globalized world to developed countries, where few people will then care that the previous death toll was zero. The key will be to snuff out the initial outbreak in Asia. As a recent Washington Post editorial concluded, “Added American assistance to the understaffed WHO in Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam could save many more American lives than 50 million courses of antivirals.”
Speaking of antivirals, the adverse reactions to Tamiflu that FP mentions are unfortunate. But when the Los Angeles Times reported in mid-November that the FDA was “reviewing 103 cases [mostly in Japan] in which patients reported bizarre behavior, usually within a day of taking Tamiflu,” it also noted that “24.5 million Tamiflu prescriptions were filled in Japan from 2001 to 2005,” and 6.5 million were filled in the U.S. in that same time.
Does that make the cure worse than a disease that caused the lone Indonesian survivor of an infected cluster of eight to become delirious and angry, to feel “like a hammer was hitting my hips again and again,” with blood gushing from his nose and “nonstop coughing fits that lasted up to two hours”? Not at all.
Instead, Foreign Policy‘s alternate take on bird flu merely proves how tricky and complex a story this is to cover. The world does not need media reports that unnecessarily stoke fear, but blithely dismissing the problem as FP does is not responsible journalism, either.
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