The Arkansas Times: Fear of flying

By Leslie Newell Peacock

In June, however, the first human-to-human infection with H5N1 was confirmed by laboratory tests. A boy in Indonesia gave the flu to his father.

Viruses — including the many active bird flu viruses, including the non-lethal form of H5N1 recently discovered in Michigan swans — evolve quickly, which is why flu vaccine must be reformulated every year. Sometimes the virus is so different that we have no immunity, and a world-wide health crisis — pandemic — can arise: Hence the pandemic of 1918-19, when an H1N1 strain killed 50 million to 100 million people, and smaller outbreaks in the 1950s and ’60s.

No one can say for sure that H5N1 will mutate, reshuffle its RNA in such a way that it finds a welcome mat in human lung cells, and set off the next pandemic.

What disease experts are saying is this: We’re overdue for a flu pandemic. If the pandemic is caused by a virus as lethal as H5N1, one we have no immunity to, the death toll could be staggering. And because people and goods travel quickly around the world, pandemic flu could turn our lives upside down, collapsing health care, economies, even governments.

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Should H5N1 spread to North American birds or mutate to a strain that will infect people, Arkansas is peculiarly vulnerable. It’s on the Mississippi flyway, which could bring infected birds our way, and the home of the largest poultry industry in the nation. The state is also on the human flyway, thanks to the corporate jets that fly into Northwest Arkansas from overseas to do business with Wal-Mart and other businesses there.

But Arkansas is uncommonly prepared, thanks to its handling of an influx of refugees from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and a Division of Health exercise that did a mass vaccination of 52,195 people in one day in 2004.

That’s the kind of work that Michael T. Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy and associate director of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s National Center for Food Protection and Defense, says is necessary to prevent a crisis.

“It is not a matter of if” we’ll have a pandemic, Osterholm said in a talk at the Clinton School for Public Service in July. It’s a matter of when, and what he called our just-in-time economy — which produces not surpluses but what we need when we need it — can’t handle a surge in demand for medical care or commodities.

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Osterholm and health experts say, we are due for a pandemic — they occur every 10 to 50 years and the last was in 1968.

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