Avian Flu Pandemic

international | eu | news report Saturday October 08, 2005 11:43 by Kathy Sinnott

How is the EU preparing for this?

Kathy Sinnott, Member of the European Parlaiment, reports on discussions at EU level about precautions to be taken in the face of the apparently imminent avian flu pandemic.

As I am on the Health Working Group in the European Parliament, I have been able to watch the hysteria build around the proposed avian flu pandemic.

Flu can kill people with weak immune systems and people already fighting another disease like cancer. Flu can also be part of the immune development of others. As I child I remember my parents taking care of us as we got every flu that swept through the schools. As a mom, I have remained fluless and able to take care of my children as they succumb to the almost annual bouts.

Maybe the flu will come and maybe it won't. I don't know. What I do know is the whole biological process is very complex and it is being treated as a very simple equation.

Avian flu is in birds, and the prediction is that it will jump to pigs and then to humans and we will then die in our millions. We are authoritarily told that the only thing that can save us is stockpiling hundreds of millions of euros worth of antiviral drugs and pre-ordering hundreds of millions of euros worth of vaccines.

My problem is that I am not convinced that everything I am hearing is true.

Do viruses inevitably jump species? No, when they do it is because of unnatural contaminating conditions. Shouldn’t we think about spending some of the hundreds of millions on eradicating some of the animal husbandry practices, like the super-intensive, Asian chicken and pig farming, that not only create the conditions for a virus to jump species, but are cruel and produce low quality, chemically toxic meat?

Maybe we should also look closer at the certainty of bird viruses reaching humans. Whenever this is discussed BSE (mad cow disease) is cited. We have been told for a long time BSE went from scrapies in sheep to cow to man. But in the last month a well researched study has just been published that suggests that BSE is a human virus and has not come from other species, that it came from raw human bones that were included in the animal bone meal that was imported into the UK from India and Pakistan. as animal feed for several decades.

If these researchers are right, BSE was a human disease incubated by the British cattle that ate the human bone meal. It was then given back to the humans that ate the meat of cattle and who received medicines that were produced from them.

Also what about the inevitability of a pandemic? Well, maybe if the hundreds of millions of euro to be spent on mass medication campaigns if the flu comes (and wasted if the flu doesn’t) were spent on sanitation, nutrition, proper housing in the poor countries and on promoting better eating habits among Westerners, we would have less to fear from flu.

When the WHO uses vitamin A in areas of Africa in preparation for measles and other viral outbreaks they have consistently found they get a much better outcome when the disease hits the population in the area. Look at their data. Measles is very dangerous among undernourished children, yet after a program of vitamin A, the children have milder cases of measles, fewer side effects and the death rate is significantly lowered.

Vitamin A is important in the body's ability to fight viruses. Are our children getting enough vitamin A? No. Few children eat liver and organ meats anymore. The dairy products tend to be low in cream, a source of vitamin A. Many eat margarine instead of butter, How many children eat dark green, raw, leafy vegetables? The list does doesn't leave much besides carrots. And don't be fooled by the "fortified with Vitamin A" label. Usually the vitamin A is industrial palmitate which has a long shelf life and little value and can even make some children more deficient in usable vitamin A. Time to rethink Cod Liver Oil. Our grandmothers had the right idea.

Okay, so what about the estimate of millions of deaths? Well this is based on the 1918 flu pandemic which took more lives than World War I. Over 20 million died, but this was very different. It will take another column to explain why it is not relevant to predictions about avian flu.

In the last thirty years, some flu pandemics have killed thousands of people globally and some have killed hundreds. Every one of those deaths is one too many and this is why we have to take any flu seriously and also why we have to look at it accurately and not simplistically.

We have a European romance with mobility and travel. One of the greatest attractions of the EU is free movement of goods and services. If we are genuinely facing a serious flu pandemic and we genuinely care about saving lives, we have to think about suspending that romance for the duration. Remember our history. Half of Europe died in the Middle Ages because people moved around. In a village, a person would develop the black plague. Everyone would flee to the next village. Tragically the plague traversed Europe repeatedly, village by village.

In those days people didn’t know any better. They didn't know that even though they didn’t yet feel sick, they were carrying a virus with them to the next village, but we do know. When I mentioned this I was told that restrictions would loose the economy billions of euros. By spending the hundreds of millions of euro on medicines and vaccines we plan to keep business as usual during the pandemic.

Our decision makers honestly think we can stay mobile and minimise an epidemic at the same time. Small pox was eliminated in Africa not by vaccine, but by quarantine. As a common practise when someone developed smallpox in a village, the village closed its doors, no one came or went.

The other problem with medicine like vaccines and anti-virals as the complete answer instead of one element of the strategy is that the very people most vulnerable to flu are the weaker members of the community, the old, babies, sick and people with disabilities yet read the drug company insert. I did after my epileptic, disabled son got very sick from his flu jab ten years ago. In the physicians desk reference at the time, under influenza vaccines, it stated it was contraindicated for people with "unstable neurological conditions". Who has unstable neurological conditions? Many of the people most vulnerable to the flu.

A lot of research in the last decade has focused on the neurologically damaging effect of mercury / thermerisol in medications like the flu jab. If mercury is the culprit and the reason that flu jabs are contraindicated for many vulnerable people (and I say “if”) then the vulnerable need mercury/thermerisol-free jabs. Yet thermerisol is a preservative which enables stock piling and mass production. (The vaccines cannot be produced until the human form of the virus is known but the vaccine base can be stockpiled.)

When I mentioned all this at the health working group which considers itself the special think tank on avian flu, one elderly doctor made lots of notes but the Eurocrat co-chairing the meeting discounted it all saying “This is not a medical discussion, can we please discuss the pandemic politically.” Politically! Well then, let's just have a referendum and decide not to have a pandemic. Viruses are not respecters of politics. But it seems we are to discuss it politically and leave the drug companies to think about the medical issues and, dare I say it, the money to be made.

Anyway, the political discussion we had after that was the necessity to ensure that MEPs are among the first to get the flu jab so that we are preserved from the flu to make all the necessary political decisions. Further, it was proposed that we make those decisions in someway other than coming together in Strasbourg and Brussels because it would be unthinkable that we precious “decision makers” might all get sick together. Alas, what would Europe do?

With those decisions to be taken, the meeting came to a close.