No. The mainstream press isn't explaining this very well, so let me cover the basics. It has to do with evolutionary biology, or what you might call microbiological Darwinism, which basically involves how these viruses survive, thrive and get passed on from one person to the next.
If you're a really deadly virus -- like Ebola, which kills 90 percent of the people infected -- then you're actually not very good at spreading from one person to the next. Why? You kill your host too quickly. You're so deadly that your host dies before you get a chance to be infectious.
In order to be a pandemic, a virus must be highly infectious; it must be able to spread from one person to another in an undetectable way. When a virus becomes less-immediately lethal, it is able to survive in the host in an undetectable state, for a longer period of time. This is what makes viruses really, really dangerous: A dangerous virus is not lethal to one individual; rather, it can exist in a hidden state and be passed from one person to the next. It's the contagiousness of a virus that makes it dangerous.
Let's say you're a virus and you consider "success" to be wiping people out. Obviously, viruses don't have that sort of thought process, this is just a way to explain their strategies. If you're a virus and you're trying to infect and kill people, you're going to be far more "successful" if you have a low kill rate but infect a billion people, rather than having a very high kill rate and only infecting 10 or 20 people. If you are a very deadly virus in the Congo, for example, and you manage to wipe out a small village, even though you were rather horrifying to the village and fatal to those people, you as a virus haven't been very successful. Why? You wiped out the village; there's nobody left to spread it. Now, again, of course viruses don't think this way: They don't have plans, they don't have strategies -- this is just evolutionary biology in play.
On the other hand, let's say you are a virus with a very small kill rate -- you only kill one or two percent of your hosts -- but you're highly infectious. You, as this type of virus, can easily spread from one person to the next. Since 98 or 99 percent of the people who are infected with you won't die from it, they can walk around cities, airports and football stadiums and spread you to all the other hosts out there. If you are that kind of virus, you're going to be a lot more "successful" in spreading.
In the history of infectious disease, the most deadly viruses, in terms of the total number of people killed worldwide, were highly infectious, not necessarily highly lethal. If you look at the 1918 so-called "Spanish" flu (which really wasn't from Spain, but that's another story), the virus did not have a kill rate anywhere near 90 percent, or even 70 percent. I believe it was well under 20 percent. But this virus was good at spreading from one host to another, which is what made it extremely dangerous.
In the history of infectious disease, especially in Africa, we've seen a trend: At some point, the hospital staff says, "Forget this -- I'm outta here!" Then they flee the hospitals, often taking the virus with them (because they've been infected). They flee into the forest. This is actually, from a bigger-picture point of view, a good strategy to protect human life. When they're off in isolation, those infected people cannot infect other hospital staff or other patients.
Even in modern times, infectious diseases spread rapidly in hospitals. In modern, Western hospitals, you see MRSA (superbugs) that are resistant to every known antibiotic. They spread in hospitals, from one patient to the next and sometimes to the medical staff who have close contact with those patients. Viruses and infectious diseases really love the type of environment hospitals provide: a successful, concentrated battery of new hosts they can infect.
This is what concerns the WHO and the CDC. These are the people who are experts in infectious disease and who know the history of pandemics. If this virus kill rate drops even further, down to about 25 percent, it will become even more deadly in a global sense. It will become more of a pandemic threat because the virus will easily slip out of the country -- out of China, Korea, and Thailand or wherever it happens to be at the moment. It will slip out, infect some tourists or business travelers, get onto airplanes and into airports and then move very rapidly from one country to another.
A few years ago, we saw the beginnings of this with SARS. Thankfully, SARS was controlled, but it was by no means a sure thing. SARS almost got completely out of control; it almost became the next global pandemic. If it wasn't for some outstanding work by the CDC, the WHO and by countries like Canada, that disease would have become a global killer. It would have produced an extremely high body count.
History judges people more cautiously if they put out a warning first. People at the WHO and the CDC do not want to be the groups in history who failed to warn the public. In terms of infectious disease, it's better to warn people about something that isn't coming, than to say nothing and have it wipe out a whole nation. At least, that's what most of these experts believe and I think they're correct. It's better to be cautious than to be wrong.
What does all this mean to you as an individual who values your own health and life? Is the bird flu virus something you need to be worried about? Should you be concerned about it, just because all of these other people are warning you about it? Well, yes and no.
In the very short term, the answer is no. It's not on U.S. soil, if you happen to be reading this in the States. If you're in Australia, it's not anywhere on that continent. If you're in the U.K., New Zealand, South America or Japan, it hasn't been detected in any of these locations. In the short term, if you're not in a region where bird flu has been detected, then you're relatively safe for the moment. The issue comes out in the long term, and the long term could be actually a fairly short time scale -- 6, 12 or 18 months. In the long term, if this thing gets out of control, we're all in trouble. Here's why:
They'll say, "Go home -- we cannot treat you here. We can only treat the most critical patients." If you're critical with the bird flu, your chances are very, very slim of surviving it. Medical facilities are not sufficient, as the WHO has widely acknowledged. The CDC has spoken out about this, warning us here in the US as well. Everybody knows this to be the case. There just flat out aren't enough facilities.
Frankly, from an economic standpoint, it's probably not even worth building those facilities just on the off chance of a virus every 100 years. I'm not saying that's my economic decision, but society has decided not to overbuild hospitals in case there might be a huge pandemic suddenly requiring a lot of hospital beds.
You have to manufacture this stuff ahead of time, too. You can't just turn it around in 48 hours. These private companies are not going to take the financial risk needed to stockpile these vaccines. The industry won't do it -- forget it.
What about governments? Shouldn't governments stockpile these vaccines? Well, some governments say they are doing so, or are planning on doing so, but nobody's really doing it right now. They certainly aren't stockpiling enough of these vaccines to treat the entire population.
Does that make you any safer? Again, no, it does not. Why? The virus has already mutated into a form resistant to Tamiflu, according to some infectious disease experts. Now, of course, this may not be relevant in the long term. The virus could again mutate into a form susceptible to Tamiflu, making it effective. But even if it is effective, how many doses are available, versus how many people might be infected? You see, Tamiflu is something that you have to take daily, so they need one dose per day for each person in the country. Do the math for about 300 million people in the U.S., for example, taking Tamiflu for just 10 days. You would need three billion doses of Tamiflu stockpiled, just to cover the entire U.S. population for a period of 10 days.
Now of course, 10 days isn't long enough, this virus could be around for 10 months. The U.S. isn't stockpiling anywhere near 3 billion doses of Tamiflu -- not even anything close to that. This antiviral prescription drug will be rationed. It will be held back from everyone but senior citizens, people lucky enough to have the right doctor or those who have the right amount of money to buy it on the underground market. Basically, it will be available to certain selected people. We have no idea how those people are going to be selected, but it's not going to be available for everybody who needs it, if anybody needs it. If there's a pandemic, you can just line up at the end of the line because there's going to be a whole nation of people lining up in front of you, trying to get their hands on some of this Tamiflu.
Right now, in the summer of 2005, the big picture is that the bird flu virus is not yet a huge threat, but it could become a very big threat, a very real threat. If and when it does, you can bet that hospital facilities will not be available in sufficient quantities, and antiviral drugs and bird flu vaccines will not be available.
Quarantine is an interesting concept. If one individual or one group of people is infected with bird flu, they obviously need to be quarantined for the good of everyone else in the community. What if there's an outbreak in a town? Would the US military quarantine that entire town? Probably, yes. What if there was an outbreak in a school? Could they quarantine that entire school? Yes, absolutely. They not only could; they will do so justifiably. I actually agree with that policy. It basically means you are a prisoner, a medical prisoner, for as long as they decide to keep you and run tests on you to find out if you are infected.
In other words, if you value your freedom, don't get sick. Have a healthy immune system, okay? Don't show signs and symptoms of being infected with bird flu virus, or any kind of upper respiratory disease. You don't even want to have a cold; you don't even want to cough, if this thing becomes a pandemic. You will be arrested and quarantined against your will, to protect the population. Frankly, if you ran the country, you would probably make the exact same decision, and I'm not arguing with it. I'm just saying that this is the harsh reality you may have to deal with if this becomes a pandemic.
In fact, right now, I could go out into my garden and I pick at least five or six, probably a dozen, different plants with potent, strong antiviral capabilities. I could make them into a tea or put them in some alcohol and make a tincture out of them. It's relatively easy to protect yourself against viruses. It doesn't mean you won't ever get the bird flu, especially if you have a suppressed immune system from drinking a lot of soft drinks and consuming red meat, dairy products, processed foods, high sodium and foods with large amounts of additives. If you haven't been taking care of your health, you are far more susceptible to infection, even with the help of antiviral herbs, nutritional supplements and foods.
Who will be the one out of five who won't make it? Well, it will typically be a person with a suppressed immune system -- someone who is unable to fight off viral infections, unable to hydrate themselves well, or who doesn't have good communication between the cells and organs of their body. We see these kind of people all around us today -- everyday people, who are following the standard American diet, avoiding exercise, avoiding sunlight, not drinking enough water, eating a lot of processed foods and so on.
Those people will definitely be more susceptible and, frankly, they're going to be out of luck. If this bird flu virus really hits, the hospital beds are going to be full and the drugs won't be there. Everybody will want to help you, but nobody will be able to. We just don't have that much medical bandwidth, that much capacity to treat hundreds of millions of people. We just don't have it. If this becomes a pandemic, it's up to you to take care of your own health and survive it.
You haven't wasted your time getting healthy -- not at all. In fact, if you make these choices today, transforming your health and giving up those old, unhealthy habits, you will go on to have a healthier life anyway, regardless of whether or not there's a bird flu pandemic. Now certainly, the bird flu gives you a good reason to be healthy. It's not really necessary though; you can decide to do this anyway.
If you do pursue this health path, if you're not doing it already, then you will have nothing but positive side effects from it. So what if the bird flu doesn't hit? Hopefully it won't. Hopefully, no one will suffer from this. We don't want infectious disease running around all over the world. Hopefully, this is all a waste of time. All this preparation -- the immune system enhancement, the modifications to our diet and lifestyle, the exercise -- could be pointless in terms of the bird flu virus. That's still completely okay because, either way, you walk away healthier.
Don't make the mistake of thinking you can pop pills to save yourself from bird flu. Don�t rely on your government, your medical facilities in your local community or even the CDC and the WHO to save you. Sure, they're all doing a great job; in fact, they're doing an outstanding job. They deserve a lot of credit for what they're doing, but they can't help everybody. Stop thinking that those people are the solution.
The solution is being healthier yourself -- boosting your own immune system, transforming your health. Don't be a chronically diseased person when this virus comes around. If you already suffer from asthma, diabetes, cancer or heart disease, then you're going to be even more susceptible to this. Being healthy will give you the best chance of surviving; you can be among the four out of five who make it through this potential pandemic.
Again, if none of this happens, then it's good for us all. We're all safer, we're all better off and you walk away a much healthier person anyway. Isn't that really what we want to be -- healthy and safe? Doing that is relatively straightforward, but it isn't easy. You've got to give up on those soft drinks, for example. I know that it's tough, but it's doable. And the bird flu virus may finally give you a good reason to clean up your diet and get healthy.