Conclusion: Year of the Rooster - The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu - page 73

in any event, mislabeled on customs forms as “H3N2”), and most of the kits had been shipped through
the U.S. mail. Although CDC experts had earlier urged the reclassification of H2N2 as a biosecurity level
3 agent, requiring the most stringent lab precautions, the recommendation was never implemented. As a
result, “the CDC [did] not have regulatory authority over the distribution of the A (H2N2) influenza virus
because it is not classified as a dangerous agent relevant to bioterrorism.” 330
Indeed, it was only thanks to Canadian vigilance that the pandemic threat was discovered at all. At
the end of March, the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg identified H2N2—a strain the Ca-
nadians consider too dangerous to use in lab certification tests—in a patient sample sent from British
Columbia. Although the Vancouver woman didn't actually have the flu, the contaminated sample was suf-
ficient grounds for worldwide alarm. While Director Gerberding misleadingly reassured the public that
“this strain of virus poses a very very low risk of transmission,” the CDC mounted a frantic campaign to
track down and destroy the thousands of samples. 331 A few missing test kits in Lebanon, near the epi-
center of the Bush administration's fears about bioterrorism, caused considerable anxiety until they were
finally accounted for by local labs. Like the Chiron scandal the year before, the H2N2 fiasco demon-
strated the public peril of lax federal regulation of production protocols and biosafety standards. How
could Washington pretend to defend the nation against the avian flu threat or bioterrorism, when it had
allowed a private company to put a potential pandemic in the mail?
While the CDC was chasing the missing H2N2 samples, a joint summit in Paris of experts from the
FAO and the OIE was reviewing the campaign against H5N1. Their sobering conclusion was that the
virus had become too ecologically entrenched, particularly amongst asymptomatic ducks, to justify the
continued economic and ethical costs of culling yet millions more domestic birds. Avian flu, in short,
was endemic and inextinguishable. It was also utterly unpredictable: the discovery of a highly pathogenic
H7 strain in North Korea in March raised fears of a doomsday recombination with “H5 lethality and H7
transmissibility.” Meanwhile, the normally hermetic North Koreans clamored for international assistance
to save their fledgling poultry export industry. 332
As an alternative to the failed culls, the FAO and OIE proposed an ambitious poultry vaccination cam-
paign in affected countries. The plan was a disappointment to experts who advocated the radical elimina-
tion of free-range poultry and wet markets. It also faced the formidable technical challenge of how to dis-
tinguish between vaccinated and infected birds, since their antibodies would otherwise be identical. More
dauntingly, vaccination would require major financial aid to poor countries like Vietnam, Cambodia and
North Korea: “economic subsidies” likely to be opposed by corporate poultry producers and U.S. conser-
vatives. Not surprisingly only a few countries (Japan, Germany, and the Netherlands) were immediately
prepared to support the Paris plan with modest contributions. 333
By late spring 2005, therefore, every biological weathervane was pointing in the direction of an im-
minent pandemic. The basic WHO assessment of the threat—an inevitable outbreak that could kill mil-
lions, even tens of millions—had been accepted by all leading players, including the Bush administration.
The rest of the print media had finally caught up with the New York Times, and avian influenza was almost
daily in the news. Yet a certain quotient of disaster fatigue was also apparent: influenza experts, after all,
had been warning of a viral apocalypse since the original Hong Kong outbreak in 1997. Almost nine years
later, less than one hundred people had died and the pandemic was still just a prediction. In the meantime,
tens of millions had died from AIDS, malaria, and diarrhoeal diseases. Is it possible that the WHO had
exaggerated the threat of H5N1?
Alas, a flu pandemic is not a fate we can avoid. To recapitulate an earlier argument: Third World urb-
anization and the Livestock Revolution have fundamentally transformed influenza ecology and acceler-
ated the evolution of novel recombinants. Moreover, there are multiple pathways to a new catastrophe on
the scale of 1918. As we have seen, several subtypes of H7 and H9, in addition to H5N1, are slouching