This Latest Health Scare Could
Wipe Out Millions… of Pounds
by Christopher Booker

Led by the BBC, Channel Four News and the Daily Mail, the media have done their best to whip up the scare over Asian bird flu. They have, of course, been assisted by claims such as that from our Chief Medical Officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, that, if the virus transfers to humans, 50,000 Britons could die, and from a senior official of the World Health Organisation, that there could be up to 150 million deaths worldwide.

On Friday the scare was brought to a higher pitch by reports that the "lethal H5 strain" of the virus has reached Britain, via a now-dead South American parrot. In fact this is so vague as to be meaningless. Millions of birds in Britain have been exposed to the "H5 strain". Even the more precise term "H5N1" does not name a distinct virus but a group of linked sub-types, only one of which has so far proved lethal to humans - and that has never been identified outside Hong Kong, Thailand and Vietnam.

The H5N1 group has been around in densely populated areas of east Asia for at least 10 years; and, contrary to popular misconception, the tendency of viruses is not to become more virulent but the opposite (for the sound evolutionary reason that it hardly promotes survival to kill off your host).

In short, the evidence suggests that there is no more chance of millions of Europeans dying from this virus than there was of people dying from eating T-bone steaks when our Government banned them a few years back. Asian bird flu joins that ever-lengthening list of scares which provoke hysterical excitement, but are eventually found to be scientifically baseless.

This is why such scares have been a regular theme of this column over the past 15 years (and why, with my co-author Dr Richard North, I am shortly to write a book on the phenomenon). Of course the grand-daddy (perhaps, in honour of Edwina Currie, it should be grand-mummy) of modern scares was "salmonella in eggs" in 1988. Only four years later did a government report concede that it had been based on a complete misreading of the evidence.

In 1996, when the media were predicting that, by now, millions would be dying of CJD from eating BSE-infected beef, this column was almost alone in pointing out that, on epidemiological evidence, there seemed to be no connection between CJD and beef. This has now been confirmed by the incidence curve dropping almost to zero (total deaths 157). As for the eventual revelation that the Belgian dioxin scare in 1999 had posed no threat to human health, this finding was reported here and nowhere else.

The problem with these scares is that they exact such a cost. The "salmonella in eggs" fantasy forced 5,000 small egg producers into bankruptcy. The BSE in beef scare cost taxpayers £4 billion for the destruction of millions of cattle that would have been perfectly safe to eat. The dioxin hysteria cost Belgium's economy £1 billion. The panic over white asbestos cement, never linked scientifically to a single death, is costing billions in unnecessary building works and unfounded compensation claims.

What makes all these examples so remarkable is the consistency of their pattern. The initial hysteria, whipped up by gullible politicians and journalists, produces a deluge of headlines. By the time it emerges that this was based on a complete misreading of the scientific evidence, no one is interested. And by then the damage has been done.
The Sunday Telegraph, 23rd October 2005