Marc Siegel is an American GP as well as a health writer, and deals with the concerns of the general public on a daily basis. Here he really does provide everything that most people need to know about ‘the next pandemic’ — particularly the fact that the current bird flu may well never become a human pandemic.

Hitchcock tapped into a deep-seated fear in his classic horror movie, The Birds. Compounding this undercurrent, the present H5N1 strain of bird flu is highly pathogenic to most domesticated birds, and bird flu has now killed more than 140 people, about half of the people known to have been infected. Siegel’s patients are afraid to travel to Asia, to touch a dead bird, or to eat chicken or turkey.

Worse, it is now thought that the Spanish Flu of 1918, which killed more people than WWI, was a simple mutation of the bird flu of the time. Many now expect the H5N1 bird flu to mutate into a human pandemic as devastating as the Spanish Flu, and hysterical media reports have created a climate of public fear.

As Siegel calmly demonstrates, bird flu in its current form seems to be very hard for humans to catch, even if they handle infected birds frequently, and even harder for infected humans to transmit to other humans. While the death rate is tragically high among those known to have been infected, there is some evidence that many more have been infected, but have recovered with no ill effects. Compared with diseases like HIV/AIDS, the number of infections worldwide is tiny. Moreover, if the virus does ever mutate into a form that is transmissible between human beings, it may well lose its virulence in the process.