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Pandemic Profiteering

The buzz in the business world today is this avian flu. Countless experts have parlayed their opinions on how this is going to be some great pandemic. Really? When was the last time you played footsie with a chicken, or ate undercooked duck? How many people are regularly exposed to chicken excrement and do not cleanse their soiled hands afterwards?

Then there are the numbers. Something like 160 people have contracted symptoms as a result of avian influenza (H5N1 to be exact) over the last two years. But where were these people? Yup, China, the worlds most heavily populated country. Claiming over 1.3 BILLION people in their country, China is definitely a contendor as ground zero for a pandemic. Yet, 160 people out of 1,300,000,000 have been affected. What does that come out to? 0.0000123% of the population. OOH, that sounds like a pandemic to me. Oh, and of those 160, or so, infected souls, only about 60 have died. 60 people dying is unfortunate and nothing to make light of, for sure, but it's 60 people in over two years, which is statistically insignificant when considering a pandemic threat. How many people die in the USA during the "regular" flu season?

Could this big scare just be another attempt to funnel pork money into the biotech economy of the USA? We are certainly spending millions to make sure we have enough Tamiflu to stave-off the H5N1 infection threat. What will that do? Make 4 million government fearing citizens ingest a vaccine that they do not need. Yummy. All in the name of prevention, right? I think not. My uninformed and conspiratorial opinion is that this is just a Bush attempt to get money into the hands of his constituents and spread the US dollar even thinner.

Does anyone remember SARS? I do, and many an expert thought that a pandemic was at hand again. Uh, okay. Here we are today, years later, and yet only a few thousand people developed SARS symptoms, mostly in China (again).

Why are our supposed experts so quick to play the pandemic card? Is there not enough biotech research money and so they need some "cause" to which they can rally and suck down more NSF and NIH money? Do we really need to have such a great vanguard to protect us against the boogey-man virus that passes from migratory bats to ducks, chickens, and eventually humans?

The Spanish Flu of 1918 was a serious pandemic because it incubated for a long period of time, which allowed the human vector to migrate across continents. Why should I mention the Spanish Flu? Well, our experts, yet again, claim that the H5N1 flu strain shares a significant amount of genome with the Spanish Flu virus, therefore in their minds it will be just as infectious. Well, guess what? Humans and chimpanzees share over 90% of their genome, so does that make a chimpanzee a candidate to become the next multizillionaire? You be the judge...

Why haven't we heard much about the H3N8 virus? If you are a dog lover, you should be concerned with H3N8 because it's the panzootic dog virus that has passed from equine to canine. When was the last time you hugged your dog? Yeah, two minutes ago? How's that for a nasty vector? There is documented precedent for human flu infections that pass on to canines. In that same twisted avian flu logic, the canine flu has a significant chance of becoming a human pandemic vector. Cheerful thought.

There is definitely a pandemic at hand, but it's not of the biological species. In this pandemic, ignorance guides the invisible hand to throw money at unseen blights and boogey-man biotechnology. We are witness to the pandemic spread of reactionary policy that serves no good but to the bottom line of pork-belly pharma.

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