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Bird Flu
Yorkshire Post - 2006
Mad Cow Disease. Foot and Mouth Disease. The insidious inexorable march of bovine TB. And now a dead swan drifting in and out of a small Scottish harbour with the tide. The new plague has finally washed up on our shores- avian flu has hit Britain.
The decomposed swan finally retrieved from Cellardyke harbour on the east coast of Scotland a week ago has been diagnosed with avian flu. Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Switzerland- it seemed inevitable that Britain would be in the firing line. Yet, for once, Britain seemed to have been spared. The bird migration season was virtually over and still there had been no cases.
It will be hardly surprising if there is a new sense of apocalypse. A thousand years ago and the monks chronicling current events would conclude that the wrath of God had yet again fallen on a sinful and unrepentant people. They would preach the imminent end of the world and the final reckoning.
But this is not apocalypse. And it is not mad cow disease. And it is not foot and mouth disease. It is a bird sickness that can only be transmitted to humans in very special circumstances and which, in other parts of Europe where it has struck appears, at least, to have been contained around the area of first incidence.
There have been no human deaths in Europe. Even world-wide the deaths from the current disease number no more than 100: compare this with the daily catalogue of death from disease and malnutrition in Africa. This is not a plague which creeps up on people like a thief in the night. It bears no comparison with Creutzfeldt Jakob disease which infected people who ate beef from animals which subsequently proved to be infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy.
BSE or mad-cow disease was a home-grown epidemic. Despite its affiliation with scrapie in sheep it was a new phenomenon to science. Government’s response evolved as the science itself prised open the fundamentals of the disease.
Foot and Mouth Disease blazed- literally- across the countryside. Government responded like a blindfold man in a cellar, groping to get to grips with the sheer scale of transmission and giving the impression- all too frequently right- of being unsure of its own response.
Avian flu has been a long time coming. We have watched it migrate from Asia. We know how to deal with it. Whatever planning has not already been made is, quite frankly, too late. But, if the experience on the continent is anything to go by this is an incursion not an invasion: in other words containable.
Nonetheless the experience of the previous diseases should set out some clear rules for Government response. These are the golden rules:
1. Set out the contingency plan clearly and stick to it. State from the onset what the circumstances are which will cause it to be changed;
2. Make sure the industry understands completely what is intended. Disease eradication can only work if the people most affected have “bought in” to the contingency plan;
3. Accept that there may be different opinions on the best way to contain the disease. Scientists are no more infallible than politicians. Set out clearly why, on balance, one course of action is favoured over another. This applies particularly to vaccination where experience overseas does not give cast-iron guidance. Of course the media will want to highlight contrary voices: the essence for government is to show that it has weighed the evidence and is able to spell out why it has come down in favour of a particular option;
4. Make sure someone clearly identified is in charge in each area and that he or she is able to command whatever resources- whether they be veterinary, Police, medical, local authority- are necessary. The greatest problem in the foot and mouth disease epidemic was the sense of management confusion. It is even more of a problem in the case of bovine TB where the government is caught starkly between the demands of those who want to cull badgers and the lobby arguing that cattle movements and faults in husbandry are the main promoters of the disease.
5. Sing from a single hymn sheet. Mixed messages are fatal. Repetition of the key messages about how to respond in the event of new outbreaks and full explanations about what actions are being taken (the myth-machine was in full-cry during FMD because it was filling a void in consistent information) are essential.
In the present circumstances the temptation to call for dramatic government action is understandable. Bring all birds inside! Pronounce universal vaccination. But few things are more dangerous in politics than the elision of activity with action.
The action is to identify, contain, isolate, eliminate, monitor. Proportionality is not much of a battle-cry but, quite frankly, bird flu ought not to be4 much of a battle. Vigilance beats vigilantes.
Swans are animals of extraordinary power and poetry. There is no reason why this sad and solitary corpse should be a new angel of death.
© Yorkshire Post
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