Let's Have a War (On Science, This Time)

Clownhall™ columnist "Michael Fumento is a, journalist, and attorney specializing in science and health issues as well as author of BioEvolution: How Biotechnology is Changing Our World ." (And a comma abuser.) The delightful Mr. Fumento, first brought to our attention by World O' Crap, is not given to irrational fears, other than those inspired by cave dwelling religious fanatics, of course.

Certainly anything based on evil, anti-God, pro-evolution science should be taken with a teaspoon of salt (And don't worry about any effect that might have on your blood pressure.) All this talk of avian flu? Doesn't really further the War of Terrorism, does it? OK, then.

New scientific discoveries keep eating away at the prophecy that “bird flu,” avian influenza type H5N1, will become readily transmissible from human to human and unleash a disastrous pandemic. This leaves little but rhetoric to counter the reality, such as massive death estimates.

We'll leave that last sentence alone. You try to figure it out on your own.

Taking this to heart, neo-con novelist and essayist Mark Helprin has proposed spending 2.5 percent of the national budget, or about 1 percent of GDP, to counter the alleged threat. This when defense spending has gone up only 0.8 percent of GDP since 9/11 to fight the war on terror and two ground wars.

May we point out that we are involved in one ground war & one occupation/quagmire, which is diverting resources & attention from the actual, necessary war. And that we already spend more on "defense" (or corporate welfare, if you will) than the rest of the world combined.

Since I began writing on avian flu back in early 1998 and then during the more recent panic in 2005, I’ve driven the scare-mongers – most of them left-wing like the mega-blog Daily Kos – absolutely nuts by pointing out there’s no evidence for a pending pandemic.

Ah, lefty bloggers. There's the culprit. This guy is to epidemiology what Megan McArdle is to economics.

Will this affect media perceptions? Pshaw! “Doctors warn the H5N1 virus is dangerously close to mutating so that it would pass easily between humans – which could spark a global pandemic that could kill millions of people orldwide,” declared Voice of America News shortly thereafter. Space limitations prevented it from saying which doctors.
[...]
All of this also helps explain one of the least-known facts about H5N1. The strain’s discovery in poultry dates back not to 1997, as we’re constantly told, but rather to 1959 when it was identified in Scottish chickens.
In other words, we’ve been exposed to this thing for half a century and yet it’s refused to go pandemic. Small increases in the counted numbers of bird-to-human cases over the last four years probably represent little more than better reporting. Yet virologist Robert Webster, perhaps the most respected of the alarmists, last November in the New England Journal of Medicine specifically cited the annual increases in bird-to-human H5N1 cases since 2002 as cause for alarm.
So what does it mean that, according to the WHO, throughout this year such cases have significantly lagged behind those of last year? You already know: “It’s even worse than we thought!”

Of course, it's just better reporting! Do you get the impression that whatever science & health attorneying he does is on behalf of large corporate entities & doctors being sued for malpractice? "Members of the jury, you're not going to let all these pointy-headed so-called scientists pull the wool over your eyes with their big fancy words, are you?"

And of course, viruses mutate like nobody's business. Maybe Atty. Fumento shouldn't be so certain in his steady state view of the universe. His column,, entitled "More Bad News for Bird Flu Chicken Littles," appeared 20 September. You don't suppose any of those pesky little bugs could have done anything sneaky since then do you? Like mutate somehow?

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The H5N1 bird flu virus has mutated to infect people more easily, although it still has not transformed into a pandemic strain, researchers said on Thursday.
The changes are worrying, said Dr. Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
"We have identified a specific change that could make bird flu grow in the upper respiratory tract of humans," said Kawaoka, who led the study.
"The viruses that are circulating in Africa and Europe are the ones closest to becoming a human virus," Kawaoka said.
[...]
All flu viruses evolve constantly and scientists have some ideas about what mutations are needed to change a virus from one that infects birds easily to one more comfortable in humans.
Birds usually have a body temperature of 106 degrees F, and humans are 98.6 degrees F usually. The human nose and throat, where flu viruses usually enter, is usually around 91.4 degrees F.
"So usually the bird flu doesn't grow well in the nose or throat of humans," Kawaoka said. This particular mutation allows H5N1 to live well in the cooler temperatures of the human upper respiratory tract.

In parts not extracted from Mr. Fumento's brief, he referred only to studies conducted in Indonesia.

"So the viruses circulating in Europe and Africa, they all have this mutation. So they are the ones that are closer to human-like flu," Kawaoka said.
Luckily, they do not carry other mutations, he said. "Clearly there are more mutations that are needed. We don't know how many mutations are needed for them to become pandemic strains."

Panic? Scare tactics?

"I don't like to scare the public, because they cannot do very much. But at the same time it is important to the scientific community to understand what is happening," Kawaoka said in a telephone interview.

Dirty liberal scientists. We're supposed to be scared of invisible terrorists, not invisible bugs.

And as always w/ Clownhall™, do read the comments. What fools those mortals be.