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MOUNTAIN VIEWS: BIRD FLU FEAR BLOWN OUT OF PROPORTION

By John Hanchette

OLEAN -- With spring comes optimism, and with optimism comes an admission that your faithful columnist too often looks upon the dark side of things and considers bad news probably true.

So, forthwith, some good news.

There it was, in The New York Times just before the weekend. Not exactly buried, and on the front page above the fold, but given just a single column, nonetheless. For its previous universal treatment as a Panic in the Streets category story, the headline seemed a bit underplayed.

"Migrating Birds Didn't Carry Flu," it said. Unless you've been in a coma or a cave, you probably carried a visceral fear during the past several months that you and your loved ones were about to succumb to a hideous, deadly avian flu virus. Those "in the know" claimed it was almost certain.

Fearful health workers and first responders almost certainly would stay home should Americans fall ill, went the predictions. That's how contagious the bird virus A(H5N1) was thought to be. True, the only global victims so far -- in the low hundreds -- were mostly chicken handlers and others who had persistent daily contact with fowl, but it would morph into a virus capable of human infestation soon. That was almost certain, we were given to understand. Oh, it would be worse than 1918, when Spanish Flu took millions of lives. That was the prospect, we were told.

Vaccines were being developed, but were months -- maybe years -- away from clinical testing. Billions in federal funds flew out the appropriation windows here and there to purchase this unproven medicine or that, or to support speculative lab work. Obscure pharmaceutical firms -- and some giants, too -- were handed truckloads of money to develop a defensive drug. Tamiflu, without being proved an antidote, was stockpiled in panicky fashion around the world. Nightly, we were treated to horror-film specters of men in clumsy white biohazard-response suits, plodding along in moonwalk strides after some hapless goose or sick chicken, wringing the necks of supposedly afflicted barnyard fowl and stuffing them in germ-proof bags. Here's the way health officials across the planet had it figured: Flocks of migratory birds that flew south to Africa and other tropical and sub-tropical climes last autumn would pick up the deadly bird virus that had originated in Asia and hopped to other foreign countries in 2005. The infected migratory birds would live long enough to return north to European summer habitats in April and May, carrying the dreaded A(H5N1) with them. From there, it would surely spread -- in this age of globalization and constant high-volume air travel -- to the United States and other bastions of "advanced hygiene" and normally "germ-free" environment. The transmission would be subtle, but swift. So we were warned, constantly.

You could almost measure the effect of the warnings by watching normally nonchalant New Yorkers and other big-city inhabitants in America on the tube nightly, publicly sprouting those largely ineffective blue or white paper-fabric face masks the Japanese wear routinely. They stop dust and some germs, said the officials, but probably won't stop bird flu virus.

Guess what? Didn't happen. The birds landed from their northward return migration without such viral infection, say European scientists. Indeed, in thousands of samples that scientists collected in Africa over the winter, the bird flu virus "was not detected in a single wild bird," according to the Times story. This is good news and quite significant for European health officials, because while sickness in domestic fowl might be easily noticed and controlled, it is almost impossible to monitor a virus in wild birds.

Health experts in France said the numbers of infection fell so steeply it is possible to conclude the northward spring migration played no role in the scant numbers of birds who came down with A(H5N1) in recent months -- a single grebe in Denmark, a couple of swans in France and a lone falcon in Germany. These rare sick birds, the experts concluded, picked up the avian flu during the winter from wild birds escaping severe temperatures in central Asia and Russia. The virus apparently never was carried in any strength to African wild birds. In Holland, Switzerland and Austria, new laws that made farmers keep most domestic poultry indoors were lifted last week.

African countries such as Nigeria, Sudan, Egypt and Ivory Coast still have some domestic poultry cases of bird flu, probably contracted from imported poultry and poultry products. But the wildlife spread did not occur over the winter. Bird flu virus does not spread from human to human -- the worst case scenario. But scientists still warn a worldwide pandemic is possible if A(H5N1) mutates and starts to do so. The virus can live for long periods in water and is fairly abundant still in central Asian lakes.

A United Nations veterinary scientist the Times found in Rome, Juan Lubroth, said the good news might stem from people taking the right precautions, but it might also be like Y2K -- a scare in which massive computer failures were predicted as the millennium turned -- "where also nothing happened."

Maybe, the UN vet hoped, "we will be lucky and this virus will just die out in the wild."

So, a breath of good news, but one not totally conclusive. One hopes for the best. One realizes it is better to be informed and daily afraid than clueless and smugly vulnerable.

But the tiny devil of cynicism that constantly whispers in one's ear makes one hope this bird flu thing wasn't all a concoction of the greedhounds who run huge pharmaceutical firms -- cloaked in the altruistic garments of public service and medical vision -- yet angle for research windfalls.


Speaking of "good" news, have you been tracking recent developments in public corruption?

Not that burgeoning public corruption -- the kind that breaks the government bank and raises your taxes like a thief in the night -- is ever good news. But the growth of awareness and government response and increased prosecution is.

If you read this paper's diligent tracking of the Laborers Local 91 case, you may get the idea that the old saw about the "wheels of justice grind mighty slow, but they grind mighty fine" is true. And it is. But the news is this: Those wheels -- particularly on the federal level -- are now grinding so intensely and so loudly, you can almost hear the friction and smell the smoke.

I'm not just talking about uber-lobbyist Jack Abramoff (already sentenced to eight years in Florida and squealing his guts out in Washington), or about California congressman Randy Cunningham, who took bribes from military contractors to throw them lucrative projects, or the racketeering and fraud conviction of the former governor of Illinois, or the unmasking of hanky-panky as usual in Chicago city government. What I'm pointing out to you can best be illustrated by some numbers that may surprise. These numbers may sadden and enrage you, but the fact they exist provides hope.

FBI public corruption investigations now underway: 2,000-plus.

Government officials on all levels (federal, state, local, police) convicted of corruption in last two years: 1,060. Increase in public corruption convictions from 2004 to 2005: A rise of 27 percent.

After the 9/11 attacks, FBI officials drew broad coverage by transferring hundreds of agents from coverage of drug trafficking and violent crime to counter-terrorism, but less ink for moving more than 200 agents to public corruption probes in the bureau's 56 field offices. The corruption investigators were surprised it was so widespread. And there's a new twist.

Previously, federal crime officials -- not all, but many -- were nervous about picking up cases first developed by reporters, both print and TV. Now, the feds are turning regularly to news outlets across the country and bringing in cases from scandals and wrongdoing first publicized in the media. It's a welcome development.

It is never good news that our elected and appointed leaders and protectors are consistently robbing the public till, cheating the taxpayers, lining their pockets and serving their own interests first.

But taking notice of their trips to the slammer is.


John Hanchette, a professor of journalism at St. Bonaventure University, is a former editor of the Niagara Gazette and a Pulitzer Prize-winning national correspondent. He was a founding editor of USA Today and was recently named by Gannett as one of the Top 10 reporters of the past 25 years. He can be contacted via e-mail at Hanchette6@aol.com.

Niagara Falls Reporter www.niagarafallsreporter.com May 16 2006