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Patrice Minors seems like a cheerful and optimistic sort of politician (except, of course, when she’s bashing the Salvation Army).

So I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised, last week, when she announced in the House of Assembly that Avian Flu could kill 41 people in Bermuda…but that Government preparations were well underway.

Forty one?

Where did that little number come from?

And how can any of the preparations she described make anybody think our country is prepared?

Let me begin by making the obvious point that nobody really knows — nobody knows for certain that avian flu will spread through the human population, or exactly how it will behave if it does.

Nobody knows whether there will be an effective vaccine developed in time to fight it, whether enough of it can be manufactured, and whether Bermuda will be able to get enough for its citizens.

Nor can anybody predict with certainty how many people would die.

Even the best-informed estimates vary widely. The head of the UN’s avian flu coordinator in September estimated that deaths around the world could be anywhere from five million to 150 million.

The next day, the World Health Organization’s spokesman on influenza insisted the correct estimate was between 2 million and 7.4 million, but he also warned: “You could pick almost any number.”

Mrs. Minors picked one of the lowest available figures, and most optimistic outcomes, and reported them to the House of Assembly and the people of Bermuda as grim facts.

She seems to base her figures on a 1999 estimate by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which stated that a “medium-level flu epidemic” could kill up to 207,000 Americans.

If you take the U.S. death toll and translate it to Bermuda’s size, you get 41 deaths. (At 300 million, the U.S. population is almost exactly 5,000 times greater than Bermuda’s 60,000.)

This would be terrible, especially for those who die, but these numbers are small enough that it would not be a catastrophe for the island as a whole.

The problem is that Mrs. Minors’ figures don’t take into account the very things that make experts so concerned about the avian flu.

This flu (H5N1) spreads extraordinarily rapidly and is extraordinarily lethal. It causes 100 per cent mortality in infected chickens, for example. When dead chickens were fed to tigers in a Thai zoo, most of the tigers died.

It has killed more than 50 per cent of all humans known to have been infected through animal contact. It is a strain of flu for which humans have built up absolutely no resistance.

The real mortality rate is almost certainly lower than 50 per cent — maybe even much lower — because many non-fatal cases are probably not reported.

Even so, “worst-case” scenarios — meaning the flu starts spreading from human to human, but no vaccine is available — can produce shockingly large numbers of deaths.

One widely-discussed calculation estimates 80 million illnesses in the U.S., with a 20 per cent mortality rate. That adds up to around 16 million deaths in the U.S. alone. In Bermuda that would translate to 16,000 illnesses and 3,200 deaths. This, clearly, would have a devastating effect on the lives of Bermudians and the ability of the island to function. If the same thing was happening around the world at the same time, the effects are absolutely mind-boggling.

I hope and trust this will not happen.

I trust that the flu will not mutate into a human-to-human kind, at least not before a good vaccine is developed and distributed.

But this is the kind of scenario that concerns health experts around the world, and has them scrambling to make whatever preparations they can.

There is a limit to what we can do here in Bermuda. The enemy is largely unknown and beyond our control. The most important battles are probably those being done by laboratories attempting to develop effective vaccines.

Yet the Health Minister’s statement last week makes me worry that we are underestimating the risks and doing too little to prepare.

The preparations she described last week hardly filled me with confidence that anything is being done at all. Most of what she described seemed more like preparing to prepare, or planning to get organized, rather than getting on with the job at hand.

For example, she said the Health Department is linking up with other government departments, outside organizations and the business community.

And she said steps have been taken to establish a committee to oversee development of a national plan and identify key players.

And she said information is being forwarded to those involved in the planning process.

The Department of Health has mailed a pamphlet to everyone in Bermuda, warning them to “Cover Your Cough”. It sounds almost silly and trivial but it is, in fact, one of the most important precautions people can take.

But unless we talk openly and honestly about avian flu and the real dangers it poses for Bermuda, it is hard to imagine that people will pay much attention to it. “The threat is real,” Mrs. Minors told the House of Assembly.

It is. We shouldn’t panic. We shouldn’t pretend we know what is going to happen. And we shouldn’t stop praying this is a false alarm, and will fizzle away into nothing. But all of us, including Mrs. Minors and the Health Department, ought to stop minimizing the risks and start maximizing the preparations.[[In-content Ad]]

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