We've had several consecutive days with little news about avian flu. I would like to think this is because the virus has run into serious trouble, preferably on a molecular level that destroys it instantly.
But when I surf the H5N1 News Gatherers list, where I get most of the information for this blog, the trouble seems to be on the human level. The news agencies just aren't doing their job.
BBC News has almost nothing. MSNBC is so far behind, I'm thinking of dropping it from the list as a waste of your time and mine. Global Pandemic News, a New Zealand site, doesn't seem able to pick up much. NewsNow is fairly good, but many of its posts are redundant. Other items appear on NewsNow only thanks to a passing mention of bird flu in an irrelevant article.
Reuters, usually up to date and highly reliable, has gone into a doze. Xinhuanet's avian-flu site is embarrassingly obsolete and much harder to navigate than it used to be.
If I understand the principles that run Google News, its lack of avian-flu stories reflects the media's worldwide neglect of the issue. When a lot of news sources run stories on a subject, the subject goes to the top of Google's list. Good luck finding much about H5N1 on Google these days.
So does this mean H5N1 really is disappearing? I don't think so. Some stories still pop up, with disturbing little details: the spread of B2B across Indonesia, and across central Romania; the young man falling ill in Shenzhen ten long days ago after his wife bought a chicken in a wet market; the protests in Tanah Karo about culling chickens when no H5N1 has been found in them.
If I were the managing editor of a major western news provider, I would mug my publisher, if necessary, to fund teams of multilingual reporters to follow up on those stories. They'd be all over Indonesia. They'd be hanging out in Chengdu and Guangdong, asking questions. They'd be taking bureaucrats out to dinner in Ho Chi Minh City and Islamabad, and plying WHO officials in Geneva with gentle inquiries and strong liquor.
I'd send more teams into Russia and Africa, and the executive members of the American Medical Association would enjoy a memorable lunch at my publisher's expense...in London, where they could compare notes with their British, French, and German colleagues.
If my publisher complained about the way I was spending his money, I would remind him that our beloved advertisers would lose exponentially more in a pandemic. And when businesses lose money, advertising is the first expense they cut back on.
Well, maybe some news source will do as I would, and its reporters will come back with the happy news that H5N1 has gone the way of the swine flu of 1976. I hope so. I'd rather be working on my science-fiction novel.
