Why the bird flu virus is less deadly but more dangerous
Posted Tuesday, June 21, 2005 by Mike Adams for newstarget.com

People are rather confused over news that the bird flu virus has now mutated to a less lethal, but far more dangerous, form. It seems like a contradiction: If it's less lethal, shouldn't it be less dangerous?

No. The mainstream press isn't explaining this very well, so let me cover the basics. It has to do with evolutionary biology, or what you might call microbiological Darwinism, which basically involves how these viruses survive, thrive and get passed on from one person to the next.

If you're a really deadly virus -- like Ebola, which kills 90 percent of the people infected -- then you're actually not very good at spreading from one person to the next. Why? You kill your host too quickly. You're so deadly that your host dies before you get a chance to be infectious.

In order to be a pandemic, a virus must be highly infectious; it must be able to spread from one person to another in an undetectable way. When a virus becomes less-immediately lethal, it is able to survive in the host in an undetectable state, for a longer period of time. This is what makes viruses really, really dangerous: A dangerous virus is not lethal to one individual; rather, it can exist in a hidden state and be passed from one person to the next. It's the contagiousness of a virus that makes it dangerous.

Let's say you're a virus and you consider "success" to be wiping people out. Obviously, viruses don't have that sort of thought process, this is just a way to explain their strategies. If you're a virus and you're trying to infect and kill people, you're going to be far more "successful" if you have a low kill rate but infect a billion people, rather than having a very high kill rate and only infecting 10 or 20 people. If you are a very deadly virus in the Congo, for example, and you manage to wipe out a small village, even though you were rather horrifying to the village and fatal to those people, you as a virus haven't been very successful. Why? You wiped out the village; there's nobody left to spread it. Now, again, of course viruses don't think this way: They don't have plans, they don't have strategies -- this is just evolutionary biology in play.

On the other hand, let's say you are a virus with a very small kill rate -- you only kill one or two percent of your hosts -- but you're highly infectious. You, as this type of virus, can easily spread from one person to the next. Since 98 or 99 percent of the people who are infected with you won't die from it, they can walk around cities, airports and football stadiums and spread you to all the other hosts out there. If you are that kind of virus, you're going to be a lot more "successful" in spreading.

In the history of infectious disease, the most deadly viruses, in terms of the total number of people killed worldwide, were highly infectious, not necessarily highly lethal. If you look at the 1918 so-called "Spanish" flu (which really wasn't from Spain, but that's another story), the virus did not have a kill rate anywhere near 90 percent, or even 70 percent. I believe it was well under 20 percent. But this virus was good at spreading from one host to another, which is what made it extremely dangerous.

Hospitals are breeding grounds for infectious disease
Viruses also like to spread in hospitals. Medical staff personnel are right there touching the patient, trying to help him or her. At that point, a patient can be convulsing and literally flinging body fluids around the room: blood, mucous, phlegm, saliva, etc. This is actually a very "successful" way for a virus to spread. This is precisely how some of these viruses do spread. They spread by putting the patient into a hospital and then infecting the hospital staff.

In the history of infectious disease, especially in Africa, we've seen a trend: At some point, the hospital staff says, "Forget this -- I'm outta here!" Then they flee the hospitals, often taking the virus with them (because they've been infected). They flee into the forest. This is actually, from a bigger-picture point of view, a good strategy to protect human life. When they're off in isolation, those infected people cannot infect other hospital staff or other patients.

Even in modern times, infectious diseases spread rapidly in hospitals. In modern, Western hospitals, you see MRSA (superbugs) that are resistant to every known antibiotic. They spread in hospitals, from one patient to the next and sometimes to the medical staff who have close contact with those patients. Viruses and infectious diseases really love the type of environment hospitals provide: a successful, concentrated battery of new hosts they can infect.

The bird flu gets more dangerous, but less lethal
Now, given all of this, let's go back to the very beginning and talk about the World Health Organization's announcement about the bird flu virus. Experts of infectious disease say that the bird flu virus is now mutating to a less lethal strain and it has them very worried. Hopefully, this now makes perfect sense: instead of killing 90 percent of people, the bird flu virus is lowering its kill rate to an estimated 50 percent. This virus is mutating into a form that can survive inside a person's body without being detected and without killing that person, so of course it will be far more infectious. See also:
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This is what concerns the WHO and the CDC. These are the people who are experts in infectious disease and who know the history of pandemics. If this virus kill rate drops even further, down to about 25 percent, it will become even more deadly in a global sense. It will become more of a pandemic threat because the virus will easily slip out of the country -- out of China, Korea, and Thailand or wherever it happens to be at the moment. It will slip out, infect some tourists or business travelers, get onto airplanes and into airports and then move very rapidly from one country to another.

A few years ago, we saw the beginnings of this with SARS. Thankfully, SARS was controlled, but it was by no means a sure thing. SARS almost got completely out of control; it almost became the next global pandemic. If it wasn't for some outstanding work by the CDC, the WHO and by countries like Canada, that disease would have become a global killer. It would have produced an extremely high body count.

SARS, revisited
Right now, the H5N1 bird flu virus is poised to follow in the footsteps of SARS. Hopefully, we've learned some lessons from SARS around the world. The statements we're hearing from the CDC and the WHO indicate we have learned these lessons the hard way. People on the inside know that we almost got nailed by SARS. If it had infected the US population, it could have easily killed millions of people. They don't want that to happen with bird flu, so they're being more cautious and raising the alarm, rather than getting caught with their pants down, so to speak, and trying to play catch up with a virus that's already become a pandemic. See also:
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History judges people more cautiously if they put out a warning first. People at the WHO and the CDC do not want to be the groups in history who failed to warn the public. In terms of infectious disease, it's better to warn people about something that isn't coming, than to say nothing and have it wipe out a whole nation. At least, that's what most of these experts believe and I think they're correct. It's better to be cautious than to be wrong.

What does all this mean to you as an individual who values your own health and life? Is the bird flu virus something you need to be worried about? Should you be concerned about it, just because all of these other people are warning you about it? Well, yes and no.

In the very short term, the answer is no. It's not on U.S. soil, if you happen to be reading this in the States. If you're in Australia, it's not anywhere on that continent. If you're in the U.K., New Zealand, South America or Japan, it hasn't been detected in any of these locations. In the short term, if you're not in a region where bird flu has been detected, then you're relatively safe for the moment. The issue comes out in the long term, and the long term could be actually a fairly short time scale -- 6, 12 or 18 months. In the long term, if this thing gets out of control, we're all in trouble. Here's why:

Inadequate medical facilities
First off, there are not enough hospital facilities in any country, not even developed countries, to handle the massive influx of patients expected from a bird flu pandemic. If this thing gets out and starts infecting a percentage of the population, health authorities are basically going to start turning away patients at medical facilities. They will have to. See also:
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They'll say, "Go home -- we cannot treat you here. We can only treat the most critical patients." If you're critical with the bird flu, your chances are very, very slim of surviving it. Medical facilities are not sufficient, as the WHO has widely acknowledged. The CDC has spoken out about this, warning us here in the US as well. Everybody knows this to be the case. There just flat out aren't enough facilities.

Frankly, from an economic standpoint, it's probably not even worth building those facilities just on the off chance of a virus every 100 years. I'm not saying that's my economic decision, but society has decided not to overbuild hospitals in case there might be a huge pandemic suddenly requiring a lot of hospital beds.

The false hope of bird flu vaccines
Secondly, nobody's going to save you with a vaccine. The governments of the world say they are stockpiling vaccines for the bird flu virus, yet I've been reading that these vaccines are just in testing. They're not even approved as drugs. They're not even being manufactured in any kind of large scale. Why? It's an economic issue. The pharmaceutical companies that manufacture these vaccines don't want to get burned by holding a bunch of inventory for a vaccine nobody needs. Of course, there's a chance the bird flu virus might be a big dud. If you're a vaccine manufacturer, you don't want to manufacture 100 million dollars worth of product just on the off-chance that some nation might need it and buy it from you. See also:
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You have to manufacture this stuff ahead of time, too. You can't just turn it around in 48 hours. These private companies are not going to take the financial risk needed to stockpile these vaccines. The industry won't do it -- forget it.

What about governments? Shouldn't governments stockpile these vaccines? Well, some governments say they are doing so, or are planning on doing so, but nobody's really doing it right now. They certainly aren't stockpiling enough of these vaccines to treat the entire population.

Forget about antiviral prescription drugs
If there is a bird flu pandemic, there are some antiviral prescription drugs that might help, such as Tamiflu. Tamiflu definitely has antiviral properties, although I would argue that many medicinal herbs and antiviral nutritional supplements are far more powerful. However, governments say they're going to have some Tamiflu sitting around, just in case there's a pandemic.

Does that make you any safer? Again, no, it does not. Why? The virus has already mutated into a form resistant to Tamiflu, according to some infectious disease experts. Now, of course, this may not be relevant in the long term. The virus could again mutate into a form susceptible to Tamiflu, making it effective. But even if it is effective, how many doses are available, versus how many people might be infected? You see, Tamiflu is something that you have to take daily, so they need one dose per day for each person in the country. Do the math for about 300 million people in the U.S., for example, taking Tamiflu for just 10 days. You would need three billion doses of Tamiflu stockpiled, just to cover the entire U.S. population for a period of 10 days.