The Titanic Paradigm - The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu - page 69

eral Dr. Hiroshi Nakajima, and the hysterical stigmatization of India by its other countries—all confirmed
experts' worse fears about the vicious circle of epidemic disease, slum poverty, and neoliberal politics. 310
An influenza pandemic would magnify the Surat experience perhaps a hundredfold.
The WHO is most worried about Africa. “Without a doubt, the virus will get there,” Klaus Stohr told
Science in October 2004. “The situation will be much, much worse than anywhere else. Access to vac-
cines will not be an option, let alone antivirals.” 311 The 27 million or more Africans who are HIV pos-
itive, of course, would be the human bull's-eye of a H5N1 pandemic. “People with HIV/AIDS,” says a
CDC fact sheet, “are considered at increased risk from serious influenza-related complications. Studies
have shown an increased risk for heart-and lung-related hospitalizations in people infected with HIV dur-
ing influenza season . . . and a higher risk of influenza-related death.” 312 AIDS, in other words, might
become influenza's deadly dancing partner like malnutrition in India or malaria in Iran in 1918; as a res-
ult, the potential death toll could be a full order of magnitude higher than the estimated 2 million Africans
killed by the 1918 pandemic. Yet, apart from some public notice taken in South Africa, the continent is
wholly unprepared to address a pandemic; many countries do not even return influenza questionnaires
to the WHO. (In many cases, public-health systems have simply collapsed under the relentless weight
of AIDS and civil war.) World indifference towards the AIDS holocaust in Africa, moreover, provides a
lamentable template for current global inaction in the face of the avian influenza threat.