Hi Kate,

Maybe given suggesting canned tuna or chicken (my favorite) his speechwriter felt tuna the better choice, under the circumstances.

You mentioned H5N1 awhile back and that, combined with a conversation I had with an epidemiologist about the same time, reignited my interest in pandemic flu. A chance visit to a remote West Virginia cemetery over 30 years ago was the original stimulus. Many headstones bearing 1918 as the year died. My first thought was WWI - but the ages (and gender) of the deceased didn’t fit; the 1918 influenza pandemic did.

No real point here, I guess I’m just wondering if you have any further thoughts on bird flu that you are willing to share.

BTW, thanks for this info on tuna and mercury.

Hey Don. Yes, tuna is sort of the universal tinned food that most everyone, in this country, understands. Minus the mercury, definitely better, nutritionally, than canned mystery meats. I think bags of rice, beans, and corn meal would be better choices, but they don’t exactly hit the yummy button. ;)

My thoughts on bird flu? Well, there’s an awful lot conflicting information to wade through. The media aren’t particularly helpful. They mostly seem to focus on the movement of birds. People who study wild birds and migratory paths think this is a bass ackwards approach that just ratchets up hysteria. Wild birds aren’t the vector population. The problem, as they see it, isn’t with wild birds, it’s with the deplorable conditions at commercial chicken farms in China and Southeast Asia, which are the playground for disease, particularly this virus at this time. Further, the practice of sending the poultry farms’ waste products and rendered chicken parts throughout the world only exacerbates the problem. Migratory patterns aren’t favorable for infected birds to bring the disease here. But that’s a false comfort. Which is kind of the point for bird specialists. You can read more about this in a recent abstract from GRAIN , an international NGO that “promotes the sustainable management and use of agricultural biodiversity based on people’s control over genetic resources and local knowledge.” That may strike some as a kind of granola crunchy goodness, but it’s what most small farmers recognize as solid science and common sense.

Under current conditions, the potential for an H5N1 pandemic hinges on the leap the virus has to make to humans and if it can learn how to jump between humans like regular flu. (I read this week, somewhere, that a few cats are now showing up infected, which can’t be a good thing.) Then every airplane becomes the potential carrier. As well as sneezing on your neighbor, obviously.

All we can do is wait to see what happens with H5N1. It has been around for about 10 years, but it has been particularly active the past three or four years. It’s changing. Whether it accommodates itself to humans in its virulent form or mutates to a less virulent form is the question.

At some point, we’ll have a pandemic. They happen. Maybe H5N1, maybe another one down the road.

We are terribly unprepared for a pandemic, in any case. All the tuna and powdered milk under the bed aren’t gonna do much to stop a pandemic—it’ll just keep us from starving if we’re quarantined or the transportation network breaks down. We don’t have the medical infrastructure to cope with tens of millions of sick people all at once. Nor do we have enough anti-viral doses to treat the population.

Which, I guess, is to say, I’m not very optimistic if H5N1 becomes the newest human flu. I think we’ll be kind of on our own to make the best of it or not. Girding up the pantry with water, food, and masks are probably sensible things to do. Now would be the time to practice rigid hygiene rules until they become habit. Beyond that, I don’t know. It’s up to the virus, I think.