Thoughts on 2008

Like most people, I do some reflection at this time of year. But rather just look back at the year gone by, I'd like to speculate a little on the year to come.

WHO's cumulative total of confirmed cases offers some room for speculation. If I'd been writing this at the end of 2004, I might be pretty pessimistic: In 2003, we had experienced just four human cases of avian influenza (all fatal), and in 2004 the total jumped by an order of magnitude: to 46 cases, with 32 deaths.

If H5N1 had jumped by an order of magnitude in each of the following years, we'd have seen about 500 cases in 2005, 5,000 cases in 2006, and 50,000 cases in 2007. And we'd be looking ahead to half a million cases in 2008, with maybe 300,000 deaths.

Instead, H5N1 has spread rapidly from Indonesia to West Africa and Europe, but the human toll has been mercifully small: only 98 cases in 2005, 115 in 2006, and a drop to about 86 in 2007. (I say "about" because the recent cases in Egypt have made WHO's December 28 total a bit obsolete.)

Altogether, we six billion humans appear to have suffered 350 cases and roughly 215 deaths, making H5N1 one of the unlikeliest ways for a person to die. If it continues to afflict us at the rate of the past three years, about 100 more people will catch it in 2008, and about 60 will die from it.

So why should anyone fret about such a minor hazard, when they're at greater risk every time they get in the car to go shopping?

Well, no one worried about that minor influenza cropping up in 1917, not when millions of soldiers were dying of shellfire and poison gas. A year later, H1N1 had grown by many, many orders of magnitude in a matter of weeks. People died far from the trenches: in Cape Town, in Fiji, in Barrow, Alaska. Influenza viruses march to their own drummer, and they don't care about arbitrary divisions of time like years.

In February I will turn 67. Not once, in my two-thirds of a century, have I ever been dead. I don't get sick very often; I even survived polio when I was seven. By all logic, I should be immortal.

But the shocking absence of bicentenarians in the human population tells me that I've just been on a hell of a lucky run. Something, at some point soon (and time flies at my age), is going to finish me off.

Something finished off four women in Egypt this past week—three of them young enough to be my daughters. The sheer unfairness of H5N1 is one reason to cover it and thereby try to frustrate it: Young men and women with their lives ahead of them deserve better than to die in a cytokine storm.

H5N1, as Revere observed today, is already a panzootic—a worldwide disease of animals, from barred geese to ducks to tigers. I sometimes marvel that I've been running a business blog for almost three years, covering the sorrows of poultry raisers from the Jakarta suburbs to the industrial operations of Bernard Matthews.

When scores of millions of people make their livings from poultry, H5N1 becomes a political issue. When hundreds of millions depend on poultry for much of their protein, H5N1 becomes a major political issue.

And if governments cannot sustain their poultry farmers, and cannot feed their people, their very legitimacy comes into question. Something worse than Pakistan and Kenya breaks out: the system falls apart, even if no human pandemic erupts to overwhelm the infrastructure.

With all my heart, I hope 2008 will see a further drop in the number of cases. Sixty would be good. Forty would be better. Maybe H5N1, in its patient efforts to mutate into something deadlier, could mutate itself into total failure, make itself a viral has-been.

But at this point it still has the power to frighten not just us, but our governments. If it frightens them enough, they might stop buying so goddam many fighter planes and ICBMs and stealth bombers, and start spending on public-health measures for the people the weapons are supposed to protect.

A robustly healthy population will survive the worst pandemic in better shape than the best-prepared individual household, with its basement full of canned soup and toilet paper. If flu bloggers can help to prod governments into realizing this, before the pandemic hits, then we will have done a service worth doing.

In mid-March 2008 this site will reach its third anniversary. I had no idea what I was getting myself into when I started, apart from trying to educate myself about an exotic and little-known disease. Like all educations, this one continues to teach me how ignorant I am. But as long as it has some value for me, and for you, I will keep at it.

May this new year be, for you, a year of personal happiness and contentment. And may 2008 be yet another year when everyone asks: "Whatever happened to bird flu?"

Comments

[mycotropic]

Keep fighting the good fight. Distributing information is the most valuable thing that a concerned individual can do in this case. Unless you happen to be a lab geek in which case GET BACK IN THE LAB!

Thanks dude and I look forward to a 2008 that will include opening your blog daily. Oh and storing supplies.

[birdfluwatcher]

I appreciate all your work and hope you will continue. I try to educate and warn and people are not listening!!! Sometimes I feel as if Im the one thats crazy...so you and other people keep showing me day after day the headlines and information to validate why I am prepping...keep going

[martav]

Keep it up! Happy New Year!

[Kelly Phan]

Thank you for all you do. Your insights are so very useful to me as I continue my diligent monitoring and preparations for that cataclysmic inevitability. Have a wonderful new year, and here's to hoping that you have nothing but absolutely boring news to cover.

[charlene]

It's wonderful to see these supporters as I too feel like I'm crazy when I attempt community education.

Thank you for your diligence and good humor. You have my blessings and support.

May 2008 be filled with Peace, Health and Abundance.

[revere]

Happy New Year, crof. I, for one, have a good idea of how hard you work to do this, a service to us all. You are appreciated.

[Susan Albert]

Thank you for your diligence. I check in with you every day and appreciate your hard work and your thoughtful comments.

[concerned]

Thank you Crof for your hard work, perspective and insight! Yours is the site I alwys check first for the "Big Picture".

[Nick]

Thanks so much Crof...hope the new year is great

[Sandra]

A billion thanks Crof, again.
I don't hear you cuss often however, there are times it's appropriate and necessary.
We will never meet in person sir but I feel to be such a part of your "world". Thank you for allowing this to be so.

Happy New Year to you all.
And an extra blast of happiness and health to my friend victoria.

With this virus being a panzootic—a worldwide disease of animals, another thank you to Tom DVM for sharing his knowledge with us all.

[birdflubreakingnews]

Crof the Prof rocks.

In a world of Bird Flu Skeptics, Panic Mongers, Social Networkers and Cynics, he is like the third bowl of porridge.

Just right.

KC, Betty and James

[victoria]

Crof,

Happy New Year! Hey - you know we all love you! See you next year. I think it might be a busy year for you. I hope you had a wonderful Christmas and a great New Year. Was thinking of your cool Christmas - very jealous.

Tom DVM,
Double ditto from me. Happy New Year! See you next year.

Sandra,
Hey there special friend! The normal Christmas day disappointments - you know petty fisty cuffs with the rellies, ran out of gas for the bar-b-q, salads wilted in the heat, drank our ice-cream, went hunting through the garbage for cards and money gifts - the usual. Boxing day here was appalling, Perth reached 44.3C (hottest Christmas Day since the 30's I believe). I think 38C is 100 degrees F in American speak, so it was really hot here. Could have fried an egg on the sidewalk. New Years eve - gave up and went to bed at 10.30 - Bah humbug - bring 2008 on. Hope you had a great Christmas and a wonderful new year. See you next year.

[Sandra]

Hey victoria, nice to hear from you! sometimes I wonder if I say the wrong thing and tick people off, then silence follows. (know what I mean?)
anyway ... here's a nifty online conversion site:

http://www.onlineconversion.com/

I've used it several times, may have even heard about it from one of Crof's other blogs, actually don't remember though.
And yes, 38 degree Celsius = 100.4 degree Fahrenheit, that's what the site told me.
Where I live, the summer temperatures are between 100 and 115 degrees. Soooo, know how you feel.

Actually, argh, this is hard for some reason. I'm not a Christian and I don't celebrate Christmas. sorry! Do believe in God though. And I celebrate "New Years" on December 21st but, I like to tell people Happy New Years on January 1st.

[victoria]

Sandra,

I am not a Christain either. However, Christmas time is also a great secular holdiay. Every December/January period we take 3 to 4 weeks off to really relax and enjoy our children. I must say that it gets up my nose that "Christmas" seems to start earlier every year.

My husband and I have worked really hard this year - our business is growing at 80% per quarter. We are having a much deserved rest.

Hope that your holiday is wonderful and relaxing for you.