The (A)H5N1 strain of bird flu was first identified in South African wild terns in 1961. Over the next forty years or so it spread slowly across the globe through wild bird populations, dramatically affecting Asian poultry populations in 2003, when it killed 100 million domestic birds. The authorities in the affected countries thought that they had controlled the epidemic until a second outbreak in 2004.

The appearance of a human form of bird (A)H5N1 was much less dramatic. After 18 cases resulting in six deaths in Hong Kong in 1997 there was no further report of it until 2003.[1] Since then there have been 124 confirmed cases resulting in 63 deaths, mostly in Vietnam. Most of the deaths were in people handling infected poultry.

Is the West threatened?
There is no doubt that wild birds will eventually bring bird flu (A)H5N1 to domestic bird populations in every part of the world. Wild birds (well nourished with robust immune systems) are rarely made ill by the infection themselves, but are only 'carriers'. The birds most prone to 'catch' the illness are those living in unhealthy, overcrowded conditions, such as in factory farming. However, the virus continues to mutate [2] and has now also infected pigs, horses, cats, tigers, leopards, whales, seals and (a very few) humans. In humans, only one ^I+possible^I- case of human to human transmission has been identified to date, between a child, a mother and an aunt in Thailand. All three family members, however, may have been exposed to, say, diseased poultry.

But how likely is it that (A)H5N1 bird flu will 'marry' with a human flu virus, creating a strain of flu which harms and spreads easily between humans living in more industrially developed countries who (a) are not massively exposed to flu type (A)H5N1-ridden animals living in overcrowded conditions, and (b) are relatively well-nourished and have reasonable immune systems? John H. Beigel thinks the likelihood is low: "The relatively low frequency of influenza (A)H5N1 illness in humans despite widespread exposure to infected poultry indicates that the species barrier to acquisition of this avian virus is substantial." [3] (This means that human resistance to the (A)H5N1 strain of flu is very high.)

World Health Organisation figures confirm that there is as yet little evidence of a growing human epidemic. In the first three months of 2004 there were 23 confirmed cases resulting in 16 deaths, nothing for four months, four cases resulting in four deaths from July to October 2004 and 64 cases resulting in 21 deaths in the first ten months of 2005, in effect a modest decline. Also, the Thai child-mother-aunt transmission spread no further, suggesting that the human form of (A)H5N1 bird flu is not very infectious.

Flu jabs and drugs
Despite what many people appear to believe, there is no drug on the market which reliably stops people catching flu, let alone a human A(H5N1) flu. As all efforts to date to develop an anti-flu drug against known flu strains appear to have failed, what are the chances of making a drug which will protect against an, as yet, non-existent strain in time to protect people in a fast-moving pandemic? Also, the performance of current flu vaccines (again, against known strains) are nowhere near what the authorities crack them up to be. And virologists estimate that the minimum time to develop a vaccine from a newly isolated human A(H5N1) flu virus would be six months. The UK Chief Medical Officer Sir Liam Davidson recently expressed his hope that a vaccine would be available to fight the (probably milder) ^I+second wave^I- of a pandemic. However, to test the effectiveness and safety of a new vaccine takes many years, so it is difficult to know whether a hastily prepared vaccine will do more good than harm. Some analyses of past 'flu epidemics' where vaccines were rushed out suggest that we have reason to be concerned (see 'Spanish Flu' below).

Not the scout motto
The UK and US Departments of Health have turned a blind eye to the problem for 40 years, and have done too little too late, so now possess no tested protection against the hypothetical possibility of what they characterise as "a bird flu pandemic like the one that killed 20 million people in 1918". Given that they could not be seen to stockpile anything which would not make profits for their friends in the pharmaceutical industry, their last straw to clutch is Tamiflu.

Tamiflu
Both countries are now stockpiling the 'anti-flu virus' drug oseltamivir (brand name Tamiflu) for key workers (especially health workers) to use in the case of a human (A)H5N1 flu pandemic. The evidence is conflicting as to whether Tamiflu reduces the risk of catching existing strains of human flu in normal conditions, but it did appear to protect poultry workers from catching a human form of bird flu H7N7 during the 2003 epidemic in the Netherlands. Also, in laboratory tests carried out in 2004, it appeared to be effective against cell cultures of both current human flu A strains and (A)H5N1 bird flu.[4] In other studies, Tamiflu also appeared to reduce both the severity and duration of current human flu attacks if taken within 48 hours of symptoms appearing.[5] Speedy reaction was of the essence. The sooner Tamiflu was taken, the more effective it was.

This is the principal reason for stockpiling a planned 90+ million courses of Tamiflu. Infection with a human form of (A)H5N1 appears to trigger an immune system response so strong that it kills the patient's body before it beats the disease. If Tamiflu has any effect at all on some future human form of (A)H5N1, it might literally make the difference between life and death.

In the final analysis, neither Government is likely to offer the majority of its citizens any protection against the first (most virulent) wave of a pandemic.

Conspiracy
Conspiracy theorists have noticed that Tamiflu sales will make US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld immensely richer. He is the chairman of Gilead, the company which developed Tamiflu, and now receives royalties from every sale of Tamiflu made by manufacturer-under-licence Roche Laboratories Inc. He probably just struck lucky. Although Tamiflu's equally effective rival, Relenza, [6] is slightly cheaper (£32 rather than £38 a course), it is delivered by an inhaler, presenting problems for people with asthma or other chronic lung diseases.

Post script - Killing two birds ...
Neither the US nor the UK Government could let the opportunity to boost their questionable winter flu vaccination campaigns go by. They have now added another (community-spirited) reason why all vulnerable people* should have their jab. Apparently, if someone already has flu and is exposed to bird flu, the two viruses might interact in their body, resulting in the human-killing virus everyone fears. In reality, the US and UK authorities must consider the chance of this happening pretty remote. If not, surely they would already be (a) working to vaccinate their entire populations against flu every two or three months and (b) donating billions of flu vaccine doses to developing countries worldwide.

In the UK, at least, they need not have worried. Although the current flu jabs afford no protection against a human form of (A)H5N1, the heavily promoted possibility of millions of deaths from a human bird flu mutant was sufficient to empty the entire flu jab stock for winter '95/'96.

* those over 65 or who suffer from illnesses that put them at higher risk of serious illness from flu, such as asthma, diabetes or serious heart and lung conditions

Both the medical establishment and the media have used the 1918-1920 'Spanish flu' epidemic as an example of what could happen if a pandemic of a human form of (A)H5N1bird flu struck. The comparison is certainly misleading in terms of casualties. Would the healthy people living in the more industrially developed countries today be as prone to either infection or dying as the decimated populations of those war-torn times? Is it also misleading in the assumption that the so-called 'Spanish flu' was the principal killer?

Some attribute many of the deaths directly and indirectly to the wide range of vaccines given to both the millions of soldiers during the war and to the millions of civilians just after the war. Green Health Watch subscriber Patrick J. Carroll, for instance, focuses on the typhoid vaccine, noting that it was a common saying in the US during the 1914-18 War that "more soldiers were being killed by vaccine shots than by shots by enemy guns." He cites:

• Dr H.M.Shelton's book Vaccines and Serum Evils: "It was during World War One, when vaccination was enforced to the fullest extent, that the death rate from typhoid rose to its highest point in history...The deaths occurred when typhoid vaccine shots were given in sanitary American hospitals and well-supervised army camps in France."

• Colonel John Goodwin, later surgeon-general of the British army, who reported that the British army had 7,423 cases of typhoid with 266 deaths, the French army 113,165 cases with 12,380 deaths up to October 1916. Compulsory vaccination was in force in both armies

Eleanor McBean gives an eye-witness account of illness in both troops and civilians during and after the war in her book Vaccination Condemned. Extracts include:

• U.S. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson confirmed that yellow fever vaccine

  had caused 63 deaths and 28,585 cases of hepatitis during the first six months of the war

  was only one of the 14-25 shots given to the soldiers

• With vaccines to spare at the end of the war, the vaccine manufacturers spun tales of "disease-ridden soldiers returning from the battlefields" to drum up the largest civilian vaccination campaign in U.S. history. The tales of sick soldiers were true, but no-one mentioned that their sicknesses might have been because of the very vaccines now being offered

• As far as I could find out, the flu hit only the vaccinated. My family had refused all the vaccinations so we remained well all the time. My parents went from house to house doing what they could to look after the sick. If it were possible for germs, bacteria, virus, or bacilli to cause disease, they had plenty of opportunity to attack my parents, but they didn’t get the flu and they didn’t bring any germs home to attack us children

• There was seven times more disease among the vaccinated soldiers than among unvaccinated civilians, and the diseases were those they had been vaccinated against. One soldier told me that the army hospitals were filled with cases of infantile paralysis and he wondered why grown men should have an infant disease. Now we know that paralysis is a common after-effect of vaccine poisoning. Those at home didn’t get the paralysis until after the world-wide vaccination campaign in 1918

Eleanor also suggested that the US's 1976 'Swine flu' epidemic was the result of soldiers being given many vaccinations over a short period. It was first identified at the Fort Dix army camp.
Both Patrick and Eleanor identify vaccines as the principal killer in two senses: as a direct killer, and because the mess they made of millions of people's immune systems left them very weak and vulnerable to a new strain of flu that emerged at that time.
Patrick also sees the UK Government's 1994 measles scare as another example of extremely profitable vaccine marketing. The imminent measles epidemic never came because the threat did not really exist, but two measles-rubella vaccine manufacturers sold seven million vaccines which were fast approaching their sell-by date.

Ed.- The high levels of typhoid amongst the soldiers may have been caused by the typhoid vaccine, as Patrick and Eleanor suggest, but the similar typhoid rates quoted for the vaccine-free 1898-99 Spanish-American War and the fully-vaccinated 1914-18 First World War raise the possibility that ineffective typhoid vaccine may play a part.