Bird flu sense

The Weekly Standard has one of the calmest, most reasonable reads I've seen on the Avian Flu yet:

What we can say with confidence is that there is never such a thing as helpful hysteria. And the line between informing the public and starting a panic is being crossed every day now by politicians, public health officials, and journalists.

Amen to that. Oh, and about that 50% death rate:

One panic button now being pushed repeatedly is that half of all persons contracting H5N1 die. "Right now in human beings, it kills 55 percent of the people it infects," Laurie Garrett told ABC's Primetime, on the same show that featured Redlener's billion-death prediction. By comparison, the Spanish flu is believed to have killed 2.5 percent to 5 percent of its victims. The typical flu death rate is less than 1 percent.

The cold-hearted reaction to these reports, paradoxically, is one of relief. A virus that kills its hosts so efficiently cannot easily propagate. (This is one of the reasons Garrett's predicted Ebola pandemic never materialized.) But in fact the reported mortality rate is problematic because of two types of "sample bias."

First, all avian flu deaths so far have occurred in countries with medical systems that are dismal compared with ours. Would you choose a Cambodian hospital to treat your flu? Second, that more or less 50 percent death rate comes from those ill enough to require medical attention--the sickest of the sick. Our experience with normal influenza is that many who become infected have no symptoms at all, nary a sniffle. So we know the numerator, but without the denominator it's useless.

Read the whole thing. There are a lot of calming facts about the bird flu, which we need more of in the face of an avalanche of panicky stories.