Weil Combats Bird Flu ‘Paranoia’

By Carla McClain, ARIZONA DAILY STAR

Our anxiety over bird flu – the fear it might set off a worldwide pandemic – is making us sicker than the virus itself, says Tucson’s celebrity physician, Dr. Andrew Weil.

Trying to calm what he sees as rampant “paranoia” about bird flu, Weil is using national media to stress that the virus remains a threat almost exclusively to birds. And if it ever develops into a human plague – a big if – there are signs it may be less deadly and more easily controlled than first thought.

Even so, Weil – who has studied influenza pandemics from throughout human history – maintains a serious respect for the potential havoc the bird flu virus could wreak across the globe, in a worst-case scenario.

“I am very, very interested in bird flu, and I do think it’s a real concern,” said Weil, a Harvard Medical School graduate who founded the movement combining mainstream and alternative medicine, headquartered at the University of Arizona.

“But at the moment, there is paranoia over it that is not justified. This virus is not contagious person to person, so the current fear of it is unfounded,” he said. “That doesn’t mean we don’t need to keep a close eye on it. We do. But we don’t need to lose sleep over it.”

Writing in this week’s Time Magazine, Weil, also a best-selling author, blamed overhyped television reports on the virus – known to scientists as avian strain H5N1 – for fueling the fear factor.

“Anxiety about avian flu is spreading far faster than the disease. Watch enough reports & and you could worry yourself sick,” he wrote.

In an interview with the Daily Star, he added that this kind of coverage “is characteristic of the general culture of fear in our society” about all kinds of exaggerated threats.

First appearing in the late 1990s, and re-emerging in 2003 despite the slaughter of millions of infected birds, bird flu so far has infected about 150 humans, killing 80 – almost all in China and southeast Asia.

However, none of those infections has occurred through human-to- human transmission, scientists believe. At this point, the only way a human can get this flu is to eat raw, infected poultry, or to come in very close contact with the feces or fluids of a live, infected bird.

For the most part, H5N1 remains a scourge of countries on the other side of the world – China, Cambodia, Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam. Most recently, it spread west into Turkey, where it has killed several children, pushing it back into our headlines.

But bird flu will develop into a full-fledged human pandemic only if it mutates into a virus easily spread from person to person. And that can happen only if viral genes are mixed in someone infected by bird flu and by regular, seasonal human flu – the type that hits every winter – at the same time.

However, when such a thing does happen, the result is a highly contagious worldwide influenza outbreak that can kill many millions, because there is little or no human immunity to it. Such a pandemic developed from a bird flu in 1918, when at least 50 million died, including 500,000 Americans.

“My grandmother told us about horse-drawn wagons carrying corpses through the streets of Philadelphia back then,” Weil said. Fifty years later, Weil himself was hit by the Hong Kong flu, in 1968, the most recent flu pandemic.

Somewhat worrisome now are recent reports that the seasonal human flu bug has been detected in the same area of Turkey where bird flu erupted, setting the stage for possible dual infection in a human.

“What we know is this H5N1 flu has been very persistent in staying around. That is why there is such concern it will mutate and spread in humans,” said Dr. Eskild Petersen, a UA infectious- disease specialist.

Along with Weil, Petersen has been tracking the discovery of recent cases of H5N1-infected people who had very mild illness, almost without symptoms. Those cases now have doctors questioning how dangerous H5N1 really is.

But Petersen disagrees with Weil that a human flu pandemic today might be contained at the point of origin – controlled before it spreads worldwide.

“If we get really contagious influenza, you cannot seal it off from the rest of the world – especially not in a society that is so much more mobile than ever before,” he said. “With flu, people can be infectious for at least a day before they know it, before symptoms appear. That’s when they spread it. With global air travel, you can take a virus from one side of the world to the other inside of a day.”

But Weil – who has traveled the world researching alternative therapies for many medical conditions, including influenza – points out that a pandemic outbreak is likely to start in rural, farming areas of Asia, where H5N1 exists in birds now.

“Those are people who are not likely to travel,” he said. “And with the good monitoring and communication systems we have today, we could make a very good effort to stop it right where it starts.”

As Weil notes in his Time essay, scientists did not even know what viruses were in 1918, much less how to track them. That allowed the killer virus to spread worldwide unchecked.

If Tucson is any indication, panic over bird flu may have subsided somewhat since President Bush made an issue of it, and the need to prepare for it, in September. Shortly after that, the county Health Department and other agencies were swamped by calls from Tucsonans worried about feeding wild birds, raising chickens, even eating holiday turkeys.

“Those calls have pretty much stopped. All that has calmed down,” said Lisa Hulette, county epidemiologist.

“Now, the calls are about the regular flu – where to get flu shots, that sort of thing. That’s what’s worrying people now.”

To learn more

* Read Dr. Andrew Weil’s essay: www.time.com

* Contact reporter Carla McClain at 806-7754 or at cmcclain@azstarnet.com.