The sky is falling! Isn't it?
OK, I may be overreacting — every time a new disease makes headlines I for some reason become instantaneously convinced that I have it or will get it, even if there’s no possible scientific way I could have been exposed. One time I was almost half-convinced that I was going to turn into a werewolf.
Still, late last year when I read on the Internet that the Asian bird flu could cause a pandemic that would decimate tens of millions of people — or more! — I immediately panicked, and assumed the rest of the world would follow suit. It quickly became clear, however, that no else one was particularly worried about bird flu and nobody had any plans to become so, unless maybe Teri Hatcher caught it on “Desperate Housewives.” Which, granted, would be compelling.
Undeterred, in my capacity as managing editor I assigned some reporters to look into the potential for a bird flu pandemic in the U.S., partially as a service to our readers but mostly to help me figure out how not to get killed by a chicken. Of course the reporters had never heard about the Asian bird flu either, but I wasn’t surprised — reporters rarely keep up with current events, mostly because of all the time they have to spend updating their resumes.
But I started to think that maybe I really was overdoing it when even the people in the medical community seemed perplexed at my concern. In fact, most of them responded to our questions about bird flu danger as if we had asked about the average person’s chances of being sucked into outer space by a giant vacuum. (We finally found one doctor who was willing to comment, but only to say that if you go to Asia, you should avoid eating a chicken that was slaughtered on the street in front of you. Which is probably good advice even under the best of circumstances.)
So after being mocked pretty much incessantly by friends, family and co-workers for my Asian bird flu alarmism, I started to let my guard down. It was right about then that the rest of media, probably faced with four minutes of down time between the Michael Jackson trial and the latest pope health update, finally followed my lead and jumped on the bird flu bandwagon. Suddenly it was on all the radio talk shows and the major news networks, and the AP even reported U.N. officials as saying the Asian bird flu poses “the gravest possible danger” of becoming a deadly pandemic. So ha!
Fortunately, it seems the virus has yet to figure out how to jump from human to human rather than from chicken to human, although it’s bound to eventually since, let’s face it, what else does it have to do? Meanwhile, the U.S. government is apparently stockpiling antiviral drugs and doses of an experimental bird flu vaccine, which we’ll be able to fight our neighbors for like crazed, simpering “Twilight Zone” characters.
That made me feel a little better, until I happened to turn on NPR (never a good idea unless you want to confront your own mortality, be confounded by the futility of world events or fall into an unblinking stupor), and an expert on communicable diseases was saying that while the new focus on the bird flu was good, there was every chance that while everybody was paying attention to that, another deadly virus could sneak in and be just as bad, or worse.
But don’t panic: I’m sure the experts have everything well in hand. And by “experts” I of course mean the writers at “Desperate Housewives.”