March 20, 2006
Is the bird flu boogeyman horsefeathers?
Ontario's chief medical officer of health from 1987 to 1997 thinks so (full text not online).
Ontario hospitals are planning to spend up to $25-million this year -- enough to employ 300 nurses -- to stockpile the antiviral drug Tamiflu to protect their staff against an influenza pandemic. The provincial government is amending its emergency powers so that in the event of a pandemic, physicians will be compelled to provide services or face imprisonment.
Prudent and appropriate preparations for an impending pandemic? On the contrary, I believe they are a manifestation of a mass hysteria that has lost all touch with its tenuous scientific underpinnings...
...there are vested interests that benefit from pandemic fear. Public-health agencies, such as the WHO, and a ménage of self-proclaimed experts, get personal profile and corporate financing by stirring pandemic fears...
The media loves H5N1 because it provides an inexhaustible source of copy, complete with lurid photographs of dead chickens and people in containment suits. But the talking heads who sounded the alarm about an imminent H5N1 pandemic in 1997 and again in 2003, not to mention the mooted SARS pandemic, Ebola and many other false alarms, are the same voices warning of impending catastrophe today. When is the media going to stop reporting their predictions so uncritically?
...We should make prudent but limited preparations for this pandemic by enhancing our capacity to produce influenza vaccine and improving our surveillance for new strains of influenza virus...
And we should calm down, stop chasing phantoms and spend our efforts tackling the myriad of real problems that we actually do face.
Posted by markc at March 20, 2006 12:29 PM | TrackBack