This bird flu has flown

Bryan Hubbard — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 11:04:00 GMT

One of the first rules of political power is to create a bogey-man (BM). As we all fear the BM, we're relieved when our political leaders are prepared to stand up to said BM, even if it means removing our civil liberties. After all, it's for our own good.

Drug companies do something similar, although they call this object of fear the bogey-man disease (BMD). Fortunately, the drug companies are on hand to protect us against BMDs, even though it means removing our common-sense or critical thinking. After all, it's for the drug comapnies' good.

There have been plenty of BMDs through the years. In 2003 we had SARs, a most fearful virus that was going to decimate the world's population. Only it didn't. This may have been because something bigger and more evil came along - avian flu.

Surely you remember avian flu, or bird flu, or influenza A, or H5N1, if you want to get technical. The World Health Organization confidently assured us that 7.4 million people around the world would die from it, and that truth-sayer President Bush assured the American populace that the virus would wipe out 2 million of them. Even our own chief medical officer Sir Liam Donaldson got in on the act. He told the credulous British people that at least 750,000 Britons would die from it. Very soon.

Thank goodness, then, that the drug industry had an answer to this BMD. They had Tamiflu, and governments around the world joined an ordely queue to buy, buy, buy while stocks lasted. The US bought $2bn of the drug, and the UK government wasn't far behind. Even the usually sensible Canadians joined the panic rush, ignoring the advice of their medical officer, who pointed out that Tamiflu wouldn't work against avian flu. The Centers for Disease Control in the US told President Bush something similar, but BM and BMDs are his stock in trade, so he was never going to listen.

So, just to recap: billions of dollars of a drug were sold, although it was ineffective against a disease that didn't exist. This wasn't even brilliant; we are in the presence of genius.

Trouble is, the drugs industry needs another BMD, and quickly, too. Anybody out there who spots the next major health scare, please let me know.

Feather brained over avian flu

Bryan Hubbard — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 09:46:00 GMT

Governments are good at wasting our money. After all, that’s their job.

But the enormous amount of money that is being spent on avian flu vaccines for key public workers has to be up there as one of the most wasteful around.

The UK government last week committed a further £155m of public money on a new vaccine that doesn’t yet exist.

Absurd as that may sound, it is in fact a step in the right direction as nobody knows what the profile of the strain is until it begins to be transmitted between humans, if it ever happens at all.

So GlaxoSmithKline, the happy recipients of the government’s beneficence, will be preparing an appropriate vaccine the moment it knows what the human form of the avian ‘bird’ flu virus looks like.

Not that the UK government has been that smart, really. It has already wasted millions of pounds buying in 14.6 million doses of Tamiflu, which even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the States has said is useless.

Although everyone agrees it is useless, the US government has spent $2 billion buying in 20 million doses of Tamiflu, followed by the Canadian government, whose own health spokesman reiterated the concerns about the vaccine.

All of this activity presupposes that the avian flu epidemic will actually happen. In 2005 we were warned that millions of us were about to die from ‘bird’ flu, more properly known as influenza A (H5N1) virus.

Since then, we have barely heard a dickey-bird (pun intended).

Adverse Reactions : avian flu

This bird flu has flown

Feather brained over avian flu