America's North Shore Journal

Michael Fumento comments in the Examiner.

Ersatz experts like Laurie Garrett, a renowned pandemic panic-monger, warn of a horrific mortality rate from the bird flu virus. “Right now in human beings, it kills 55 percent of the people it infects,” she told ABC News’s Primetime last year. St. Jude’s alarmist Webster referred to a similar death rate in his New England Journal of Medicine article, and the media routinely parrot it. By comparison, the devastating 1918-1919 Spanish flu is believed to have killed 2.5 percent to 5 percent of those it infected. The death rate in a typical flu season is less than 1 percent. It’s true that, of bird flu cases recorded by the World Health Organization, 59 percent have died. But this is a mere artifact with an obvious explanation: Only people with the most severe cases go to the hospital and become part of the dataset.

As to what the true mortality rate is, over a three-month period in 2004, Swedish and Vietnamese researchers studied 45,478 residents in a rural district in Vietnam that had H5N1 outbreaks to find out how many had contact with sick birds and how many had flu-like illnesses. They published their results in January 2006 in the Archives of Internal Medicine. They found that of 8,149 who had a flu-like illness, 650 to 750 probably caught it from birds. Yet for all of 2004, the World Health Organization data indicated only 29 Vietnamese cases with 20 deaths. Thus what might seem to be a horrific mortality rate of almost two in three, or 69 percent, appears to be actually around one in 140 or 0.71 percent. This, in the rural portion of a Communist country with a state-run medical system. That 0.71 percent is in the same range as seasonal human flu.

More good news from Vietnam, incidentally, is that it has reported zero cases in 2006. Why? As I wrote last year, “Vietnam appears to be making a heroic effort to inoculate all of its poultry.” If you can keep poultry from getting flu, you’ve knocked down the chance of a human pandemic from close to zero to absolute zero.

Michael and I have been in virtual agreement about avian flu from the beginning. Please go and read the entire Examiner article. This exerpt is from page two.