So here we were, with the whole human race wiped out, not by atomic weapons or bio-warfare or pollution or anything grand like that. Just the flu.
Stephen King, "Night Surf" (1974)
Panic has broken out across Europe as a potential flu outbreak has reached the edge of the Western world.
Globe and Mail, October 14, 2005
The prospect of a killer virus wiping out the bulk of humanity has long haunted Western popular culture. Stephen King’s short story about a lethal strain of flu (labelled A6) that spread from Asia across the world became the basis for The Stand, one of his few novels to survive the dual tests of time and movie adaptation. More recently, 28 Days Later similarly brought mankind to the brink of extinction. Half a century ago, so did Richard Matheson in I Am Legend. Yet the first such tale of our virtual extinction is even older than that. Almost two centuries ago, Mary Shelley – author of Frankenstein – wrote The Last Man, in which the world of the late 21st century has been ravaged by a global plague.
One purpose of such fictional nightmares, some psychologists maintain, is that they allow us, vicariously, to confront our deepest collective fears. Maybe. But in the wake of the most recently identified threat of avian flu (labelled H5N1), scientists and the media alike have turned not to fiction, but to history as their guide to action.
First detected in Hong Kong in 1997, H5N1 has since spread to more than a dozen countries. In the last two weeks, its appearance in Romania and Turkey has raised alarms in central and western Europe. So far, it seems, this lethal variation of avian flu – lethal in that humans lack any immunity to the virus – has been spread by wild birds as they travel along their seasonal migratory paths. This means, among other things, that North America should be relatively isolated from the threat of infection. But the traffic and trade – legal and illegal – in both live birds and poultry products probably means that any such isolation will be short-lived. In short, H5N1 will almost certainly strike Canada, sooner or later.
That prospect had prompted all manner of "Chicken Little" reports in the media over the past few weeks. The Globe and Mail, for example, apparently drawing on a detailed account in the October edition of the National Geographic, recently claimed that as many as 360 million might perish in the anticipated flu pandemic.
Holy cow – 360 million? But wait. Just where did such a figure come from? A report from the World Health Organization, cited by the Globe and Mail, estimates a likely death toll of between two million and 7.4 million. The vastly larger figure of 360 million appears to have originated in a report from the Centre for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, but on closer inspection even that source offered a possible range of deaths of between 180 million and 360 million.
Still, the spectre of 360 million deaths seems to have taken root. The National Geographic accepts it, claiming it to be an extrapolation from the Spanish Flu pandemic that swept in 1918-19. Yet the total number of deaths attributed to that outbreak – now largely believed to have been an avian virus similar to today’s threat – has never been accurately tallied. Estimates range from a low of 20 million, through a mid-range count of 50 million, to a high-end speculative guess of 100 million. The point is, however, that nobody really knows, and so any extrapolation based on the 1918-19 flu epidemic must similarly be open to question.
What do we know for sure? So far, H5N1 influenza has killed about 65 people, in total. Worldwide, in a "normal" year, about 500,000 individuals die from various strains of flu. In America alone, the annual death toll is about 36,000. That figure may look high – for example, it’s 500 times the total number of H5N1 victims – but with between 30 million and 60 million Americans contracting flu each year, the actual mortality rate is only between 0.1 and 0.2 per cent.
Or let’s turn once more to the 1918-19 pandemic as a precedent for the impact of H5N1. And let’s accept the National Geographic’s claim that virtually "everyone on Earth was exposed to the disease, and half got sick." What were the results? In the U.S., as many as 850,000 people died. The death rate varied from state to state, but in cities such as Boston, Washington, Philadelphia and Baltimore, between 10 and 15 per cent of all residents succumbed. In the islands of the South Pacific, the rate was closer to 20 per cent; in Alaska, where First Nations inhabitants had little or no resistance to such diseases, the flu killed 60 per cent of the population. In terms of its extent and overall numbers, the pandemic of 1918-19 was and remains the world’s worst plague in history.
And yet… humanity survived. Even accepting the high total of 100 million deaths, that means that 95 per cent of humanity survived intact. And as quickly as it came, within months the flu vanished completely, suggesting that human survivors had developed at least a measure of immunity.
But even if H5N1 does its worst and wipes out 360 million human beings, this will still be far short of the apocalyptic scenarios painted by Mary Shelley, Stephen King et al. As in the case of 1918-19, even such a massive loss of life would barely dent the world’s population, with roughly 94 per cent remaining alive.
Compare that to the Black Death of the mid-1300s, which wiped out a full quarter of Europe’s population. And yet while even that plague brought about massive short-term distress and disaster, in the long term, the social, economic and political changes it forced upon Europe actually heralded a new age of global pre-eminence for that tiny continent.
In short, there’s no reason to believe that the threat posed by H5N1 means the end of the world in any real sense. For better or worse, we’ll still be here long after Chicken Little has had his way with us…. |
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