Bird flu hysteria?

From here:

An 11-year-old girl became the third victim of bird flu in Turkey yesterday, days after her brother and sister died from the disease. Hulya Kocyigit, 11, died in a hospital in the eastern city of Van, as teams from the World Health Organisation and the European commission arrived in the region to assess the risk.

Doctors said the Kocyigit children had almost certainly contracted bird flu after playing with the heads of dead chickens at their parents' rural poultry farm. The girl's sister Fatima, 15, and brother Mehmet Ali, 14, died earlier this week. They are the first to have died from the H5N1 bird-flu strain in Turkey, prompting fears it could spread to mainland Europe.

I have mixed feelings on this. I keep on reading about dire predictions of levels of deaths unseen since the 1917 flu pandemic. Color me cautious, yet skeptical. After all, there are on an annual basis no fewer than 30,000 deaths either directly or indirectly attributed to the flu every year. But the current death toll from the bird flu numbers only around 70. And only after close contact with infected birds. And yes, I know that they expect it to mutate into a human-to-human transmissible form; but does anyone remember the hype of impending doom that came with SARS? And we've come a helluva long way with medical technology since 1917.

Put it this way. I'm not losing any sleep over this.



(Filed under world affairs)