Top bird flu threat in U.S. may be panic

As far as I can tell, the only people who should be worried right now about bird flu are the ones who make money off birds.

Maybe I should be more graphic — the ones who work in the $29 billion U.S. poultry industry; the ones who produce more chickens and turkeys every year than any other country.

To be clear, they shouldn't worry so much about the actual flu itself — not unless they also like to guard against rhinoceros stampedes, meteor strikes and other rare events. They should, however, worry about something much more devastating: bird flu panic.

As soon as one dead bird shows up with the virus somewhere in the continental United States, it may be hard to stop the stampede away from chicken nuggets and buffalo wings (unless enough Americans believe those things really do come from buffalo).

Even the government seems ready to feed the panic. Last week, the Agriculture Department hinted it would turn to an old-West style of justice in dealing with any sign of the disease in U.S. flocks — slaughter first, ask questions later. If one bird gets sick, the entire flock will go, even before any tests are complete.

And, it goes without saying, before any evidence that humans are in danger.

Our former governor, Mike Leavitt, probably wishes he could take flight from having to deal with this as Secretary of Health and Human Services. He's in a difficult spot. As he made clear in a speech at the National Press Club last week, he can't afford to be nonchalant about the possibility of a flu pandemic that might kill millions of Americans. That's something you wouldn't want to wake up to on CNN without having a plan in place.

But you can't really put a plan together in secret, and any time he talks about the possibility of a pandemic, he runs the risk of inciting public panic, which brings us back to all those poultry farmers.

And Leavitt no doubt is finding out that former FEMA director Michael Brown is a tough act to follow. Brown's disastrous handing of Hurricane Katrina may have many Americans feeling a little skittish about trusting the government to handle a widespread flu outbreak, should it come.

Underlying this debate is a growing sense of unease and doubt worldwide, even, apparently, among scientists. This flu virus has had a lot of time now to mutate into something that can pass from one human to another. But to date, only 109 people are reported to have died from it, and they, for the most part, dealt directly with infected birds. The virus simply hasn't done what the most dire predictions said it would do.