Bird flu has exploded out of Asia into Western Europe, possibly South America and eventually all the way to the US. Commitees of important people the world over are meeting dilligently to solve the problem. Bird are being dutifully slaughtered in their billions.
Dozens--dozens!--of people have died. The subject itself has been nearly diaried to death here at Daily Kos, front-paged on a weekly basis, used as yet more fodder for (admittedly righteous) attacks on Bush administration incompetence.
But a few articles I've read in the last two days have gotten me thinking--is this another 'shark attack' scare? Is this next year's candidate for 'whatever happened to (SARS)(Anthrax scare)(Ebola)'?
Or in other words, aren't there more important things to be worrying about right now?
The first article I read got me thinking about scale of effort and return on investment in health care. Sorry for the capitalist/economic mumbo jumbo, but really, when you're talking about efforts involving billions of dollars that affect hundreds of millions of people, it can get a little abstract. The article (sorry can't find it on line) was the cover story of last weeks New Yorker, "Can Bill Gates Save Africa?" Leaving aside how much trust we should place in the hands of the world's richest man to solve our public health dilemmas with handouts to initiatives cherry-picked by him and his wife, the article (and Gates himself) make some quite interesting points.
The one I found most striking and logical I would paraphrase this way: why do we have this tendency to spend millions and millions of dollars trying quixotically to cure obscure diseases that affect only a tiny, tiny number of people, when for a few bucks a person you could literally eradicate diseases like malaria, measles and polio from the entire world? The cold calculus of it: you could save the lives of millions of African children with an investment of a few hundered bucks apiece. That we don't do this is a matter of choice, not a matter of resources.
Malaria kills millions of people a year in the developing world. Bird flu...112?
The other essay in yesterday's Times put the issue more specifically into perspective.
Of four patients I saw in a single hour last week, three announced how scared they were of the avian flu. I reassured them, but there was quite a bit I did not say, and here it is.
I did not say: If you want to be scared, then how about that drug habit of yours you think I don't know about? How about the fact that you are 100 pounds overweight and eat nothing but junk? How about the fact that in a few short months Medicaid is going to stop paying for your very expensive medications and no one knows how just high that Medicare Part D deductible and co-payment are going to be? I did not say: If you want something to be scared of, how about the drug-resistant Klebsiella that is all over this very hospital, an ordinary run-of-the-mill bacterial strain that has become so resistant to so many antibiotics that we've had to resurrect a few we stopped using 30 years ago because they were so toxic.
That Klebsiella is one scary germ. It's in hospitals all over the country, and by now it's probably killed a thousandfold more people than the avian flu.
But you don't hear much about our Klebsiella. Like our bad habits and our dismally insoluble health insurance tangles, our antibiotic-resistant bacteria are with us, right here, right now. Apparently they all lack the drama, the suspense, the titillating worst-case situations that energize our politicians and turn into a really newsworthy health care scare.
We spend a lot of time around here talking about how deplorable it is that the dishonest, sensationalist media drive the national discussion. And there is obviously a difference between spending millions of dollars and months of airtime focusing on the search for Natalee Halloway and hyping the by most accounts extremely remote possibility of Bird Flu becoming some kind of global health armageddon--namely, that the issue, however remote, is one worth finding a solution for. But it's a pity that human nature dictates that problems get addressed not in relation to their actual importance, but only in relation to the drama of the details and the hysteria that drama can create.
At least...I hope it's just needless hysteria...