Avian flu or Chicken Little?

Avian flu has generated more hype than Britney Spears; it’s an international favorite for worry warts and, locally, nobody has forgotten the SARS scare, and folks wonder aloud if some kinky chicken virus is going to wipe out what’s left of the Commonwealth’s tourism industry.

…a 757 lands on Saipan, the door opens, and a weird, gelatinous ooze pours out of the plane and hits the tarmac in big glops. Zombies, who didn’t even bother to fill out their 25-page visitor arrival forms, stagger out of the airplane, leaving trails of viscous slime behind them. The EMO declares an emergency, and men in white hazmat suits try to herd the zombies into isolation areas as waves of hermit crabs scurry across the tarmac, eating the zombie slime and mutating horribly….by the time they roll by Herman’s Bakery they weigh 350 pounds each, have claws the size of toasters, faces like feminists, and they can’t be stopped…

….Saipan is put under federal quarantine. Food imports are cut off. The island becomes a doomed outpost straight from the pages of Camus’ “The Plague…”

Ah! Enough already. I’ve had it with this avian flu stuff.

Every time I try to see if the avian flu story has any backbone in it, I come away convinced that the logic is more fuzzy than specific. Nasty pandemics periodically pimp-slap the world, we’re told, so it’s just a matter of time before some wretched super-virus asserts itself again.

OK, I’ll buy that logic. What I don’t buy is that I should be any more afraid of this threat now than I was, say, last year, or a decade ago, or a decade before that. Has anything really changed? If so, exactly what? When some grim faced news anchor reports that some poor kid in Asia died of an avian flu, does this mean that such deaths didn’t happen 10 years ago?

Nobody seems to say. If there is a trend here, it has not been presented to slobs like me in the general public.

But the media are on to something, namely, that the public really soaks up scare stories, data or no data. There’s always some beard-scratching pundit interviewed by the global press, telling the world about the “serious threat” posed by the scare du jour. My Reader’s Digest sweepstakes envelope might have anthrax in it. The planet is melting. Grandma might be a serial killer, brewing meth in her bathtub to support her homicidal forays (“can’t trust anyone these days…”). The world has sprung a leak and all the oil is running out of it. Giant asteroids are going to crash into the planet, blotting out every form of life except amoeba and tuba players.

I think we’ve got a fear pandemic. Neurotics who worry about asteroids hitting the earth used to be locked away. Now they’re giving press conferences.

Anybody here remember the U.S. Swine Flu “epidemic” of 1976? It was an epidemic, all right: an epidemic of hysteria. I remember it. More people died from the vaccine than the actual flu itself.

I’m not deriding the efforts of public health officials; those guys are supposed to worry about pandemics all the time, just as civil engineers worry about earthquakes and meteorologists worry about typhoons. But if a civil engineer started jabbing you in the chest every day and lecturing you on earthquakes, you’d quickly cross him off your cocktail party list.

Saying that some disaster “might” occur or “could” happen makes no hay with me…anything “might” or “could” happen; the universe is salted with an infinite array of potential bummers. Exploding stars. Leaky carburetor gaskets. Disco. Until they show me a genuine probability, backed with meaningful data, that a large scale human-to-human transmission of some avian flu is in the works, well, I’m going to go back to worrying about my receding gum line and expanding waste line.

You’ll recall that it was the SARS scare, not SARS itself, that messed up travel and tourism.

Indeed, if we worried about everything that experts told us to worry about, we’d die of worry.

So we’ll just invoke ol’ Camus again and agree with his trademark quip that life is absurd. Avian flu? I greet the specter with a French shrug of the shoulders and perhaps a slug of wine and a wink at the waitress. There is this proverb from my country, you see, about a boy who cried wolf…

(Ed Stephens Jr. is an economist and columnist for the Saipan Tribune. E-mail him at Ed@SaipanEconomist.com.)