Staying prepared for a pandemic is wise health policy

Nearly three years ago I wrote a column telling everyone to chill over the bird flu. Quit avoiding the poultry aisle, I said. Don't act like a turkey.

At that time, there were nightly reports on the news of dead birds found off one coast or another and of flocks of chickens infected in far-off lands. We seemed to be skittish every time something moved through the air. The government even said it would slaughter first and ask questions later if it heard of an outbreak on a farm.

I reminded people there were plenty of other, real threats to worry about, such as looking both ways before crossing the street, or even the good-old-garden-variety flu mutations that are guaranteed to kill about 40,000 people a year.

That led to a few nasty e-mails, including one from a nurse telling me the column was "the most irresponsible piece of colossal ignorance I have yet to read on avian flu." I shouldn't be hung up on the "bird contact thing," she said. It's all about "H2H transmission" and I was encouraging the complacency of the ignorant masses.

I got that, actually. She hadn't read past a few lame jokes about chicken nuggets and buffalo wings. Lame jokes can get in the way of the best information.

But the thing is, now I'm beginning to think the nurse had a point — not about me being colossally ignorant, mind you, but about complacency and ignorance in general.

Three years later and we're still waiting for the H5N1 virus to make that leap of a mutation from infecting birds to infecting, and being transmitted by, humans. It may never happen, but it will with some virus. Count on it.

That was the message former Health and Human Services secretary (and former Utah governor) Mike Leavitt conveyed when I asked him about it last week.

"Here's the deal on pandemics," he said. "They're just a part of biologic fact. The microbes are just constantly working to figure out ways to invade their hosts. And every 30 years or so one succeeds in cracking the code."

Leavitt said he sees no reason to believe the 21st century will be any different from any other century. "And what's occurred in previous centuries is it always catches people by surprise. It happens far enough apart that we always let our guard down, and millions of people die."

In the 20th century, we had the Spanish influenza epidemic that, aided by the ravages of war, swept around the world in 1918. It killed about 675,000 people in the United States alone. Then there was the Asian flu in 1957, which killed 69,800 in the United States. Far behind that was the Hong Kong flu in 1968, which was a mild pandemic.