EU Referendum

Showing posts with label bird flu. Show all posts

Ostrich%202[i-Ostrich%202]Feeling a little guilty about the relatively sparse coverage of the EU on the blog – slightly fatal given its title – I snuck a look at David Rennie's blog on The Daily Telegraph. He is, after all their Brussels correspondent. It was some consolation, therefore, to find that he is writing about Paris and many of his recent posts have been about anything other than the European Union.

If you really want a story throbbing with excitement though, go here to read about how the EU on Wednesday lifted a two-year ban on South African ostrich meat imposed after bird flu fears. The interesting thing there is the sudden thought: whatever happened to bird 'flu? Weren't we all going to die, or something?

With no bodies in the streets, even Open Europe is struggling to find something interesting to report in its summary. One of the really exciting stories (irony alert) is a row between Margaret Beckett, the foreign secretary, and Geoff Hoon, the Europe minister, over who answers questions on Europe. The Times had it that "Beckett gags her deputy after row over Europe role", reporting that, "A Cabinet rift has opened up…".

Zzzzzzzzzz.......

Al%20Jazeera[i-Al%20Jazeera]Far more interesting, and significant in the longer term, Al Jazeera has announced that it is going to launch its English-language service on 15 November. If its website is any guide, it will be giving the BBC a run for its money and will certainly be a more reliable source of news.

Interestingly, it turns out that the editor-in-chief, Ahmad al-Sheikh, is BBC-trained. He sums up his channel's journalistic ethos in this way: "Be accurate, factual, be there first - that's not necessarily most important - and be with the human being all the time. You don't stay at the top getting the views of politicians and diplomats."

Returning to the EU, the big news is going to be – but not just yet- a collapse of Turkey's bid to join the EU. Ankara, we are told, faces scathing criticism over its record on civil rights which, with a failure to resolve the Cyprus situation, looks pretty terminal. But then, as you read on this blog, the Turkish government has already written off any prospect of joining the EU.

With riots in Paris, but not as big as last year, the real news focus shifts to Naples, where Prodi is considering sending in the Army to restore order after a bloody, Mafia-related crime spree has claimed seven lives since Friday.

As for the European Union, it really is hard to conclude anything else other than this is an organisation that is going nowhere. It may be years before it collapses but around it there is already the stench of death. But when they get to do the post mortem, they will find it died of boredom.

COMMENT THREAD

double-click to enlarge[i-double-click to enlarge]The news agency Deutsche Presse-Agentur has come up an intriguing story, headlined: "EU slammed for not releasing funds to fight bird flu".

The substance is that, for all its pretensions of being a global power, the EU is under attack for failing to release any of the money it promised to help in the global fight against bird 'flu.

The complaint comes from the head of the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE), Bernard Vallat, who was having a general moan about donors not putting their money where their mouths are. Some $1.9 billion had been pledged at the International Pledging Conference on Avian and Human Pandemic Influenza held in the Beijing on 17-18, but the organisation had so far received only $16 million.

Of the defaulters, Vallat singled out the EU as "the worst case". Having made its promises, it had "not even decided how to allocate the amount", he said.

Vallat was responding to questions by a French parliamentary commission on bird 'flu. This had recently returned from Senegal and Mali and was demanding to know why these two countries had not received any aid to fight the H5N1 virus.

Afterwards, it was the head of the commission, Jean-Marie Le Guen, we delivered the killer line. In a press conference, he told journalists that the matter involved "a very serious governmental error by Europe," which was risking its "political credibility".

We are somewhat surprised that anyone believes that the EU still has any "political credibility", but there you go.

COMMENT THREAD

poultry[i-poultry]As bird flu climbs its way back up the news agenda, displacing even the continuing "Cartoon Wars" protests, perhaps the most significant recent news is a recent declaration by Italy that far transcends the issue of this encroaching avian disease.

According to The Financial Times, the thrust of the declaration is that the Italian government is prepared to defy EU limits on state aid for farming in order to come to the rescue of its beleaguered poultry farmers.

With Italian consumers shunning poultry meat, as the "deadly" H5N1 virus takes root in Europe, prices have fallen by up to 70 percent and Silvio Berlusconi's government, which is seeking re-election in April, has been under pressure to help farmers.

As a first port of call, Gianni Alemanno, the Italian agriculture minister, has turned to Brussels, asking for permission to double to €40m subsidies earmarked for farmers left with unsold poultry. But such are the electoral imperatives that he has said that, even if the government does not get authorisation, "we will ask the government to go ahead even if it means risking EU sanctions."

The significance of this, of course, is the cavalier way the Italian government seems to be treating its Brussels superiors. It could hardly contemplate doing so if it felt that it was dealing with a virile political entity at the peak of its powers.

In a sense, therefore, we could be looking at yet another step in the decline and fall of the empire, as the margins begin to break away from the centre. This we saw in the collapse of the great Roman Empire. How interesting it is that, this time round, Rome seems to be leading the fragmentation.

COMMENT THREAD

boring.0[i-boring.0]For some little time now, I have been toying with the idea of penning a letter to Margery Proops, the famous agony aunt – if she still exists. My letter would be short and to the point, couched in the following terms:

Dear Margery, I am the co-editor of a "blog" on European Union affairs, and should be writing a clinical account of the goings-on in the organisation. Increasingly, however, I find its proceedings so utterly tedious that I am struggling to find the motivation to put fingers to keyboard. Instead of writing earnest analyses, I am more inclined simply to take the p**s. What is wrong with me? What should I do?

That, however, looks like being one of those great, unwritten letters of history (there's self aggrandisement for you). Before writing it, I availed myself of my own counsel. Often enough I have warned analysts to beware of trying to distil order and coherence from a confused situation, when the reality of the situation is that it is confused. Likewise, rather than search into my own soul for reasons as to why I find the EU boring, the more simple explanation is simply that the current behaviour of the EU is, er… boring.

Sound%20of%20Europe[i-Sound%20of%20Europe]What brings this on is the account in The Telegraph of the great Austrian presidency extravaganza in Salzburg, its "Sound of Europe" conference, something we flagged up earlier this month.

The conference, aimed at giving "fresh impetus to the spluttering European Project", has already run into trouble, with the assembled EU worthies not even able to agree amongst themselves that there is a crisis at all, much less come to a "consensus" on what to do about it.

Thus we have that towering statesman, Jan Peter Balkenende, the Dutch prime minister, complaining that, "To talk about a crisis is not right... Such talk (is) a distraction from problems where the EU could prove itself, such as fighting terrorism, crime and pollution."

link[i-link]Hilariously, French prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, "in a tough speech" went on to prove Balkenende right. After attacking the "rapidity" of enlargement as the proximate cause of EU troubles, he went on to propose a list of projects to bring the bring the EU back into line. Described by the Telegraph, as "distinctly modest", these included proposals for a Franco-German border police, co-operation over bird flu, and the creation of a committee to award "European heritage" status to tourist sites.

That indeed does make my point. In a week when the EU finance ministers were tearing themselves apart over the vexed question of VAT on hairdressers and French restauranters, now Villepin is agonising over "the creation of a committee to award 'European heritage' status to tourist sites."

Compare and contrast this with another piece in The Telegraph, which reports: "EU shows signs of panic on aid to Palestinians aid".

This records how the EU's "united front" over Hamas's shock win began to fracture yesterday as governments debated whether the EU should continue Palestinian aid payments, or suspend the flow of money until the group renounces terrorism.

Then there is the account which we picked up in the small hours of this morning, where the EU is planning to delay referring Iran to the Security Council, in the hope of attracting support from Russia and China for its action – despite the obvious hazards of such a delay.

Given the monumental importance of the events in the Middle East, and the imminence of a showdown that could have devastating effect on the global economy and the political stability of not only the Middle East by also Europe, you would have thought that, at the very least, the assembly in Salzburg would have ditched their navel-gazing agenda. A more grown-up reaction would have been to convene crisis talks, if only to emphasise the gravity of the situation.

Small wonder, therefore – as my co-editor constantly reminds us – the United States is increasingly regarding the European Union and it member states as an irrelevance; marginal players on the fringes of events, bogged down as they are on squabbles about hairdressers, obsessed with questions of "European identity" and awarding "European heritage" status to tourist sites.

More and more it is becoming evident that the "little Europeans" are unable to cope with the real world and are retreating into their fantasy world of trivia and irrelevancies. You cannot take them seriously, or even find them interesting. They are losing the plot.

COMMENT THREAD

eggs[i-eggs]On the avian influenza front, most newspapers today in some way focused on the comments made by the European Food Safety Authority's director of science Herman Koëer. It was he who, yesterday, urged people to avoid eating raw eggs and poultry because of a "theoretical risk" of contracting bird flu.

"Alarmist and unhelpful" was the view taken by British farmers, according to the Daily Telegraph report, with plenty more condemnation from other sources. The best that could be said of the man is that he had been "naive".

The Scotsman recruits Professor Hugh Pennington, to say that the European Food Safety Authority had reiterated long-standing advice related to salmonella in a "quite inappropriate" way, arguing that the chance of a human catching the virus from eating an egg was "for all practical purposes, zero".

In Italy, where poultry consumption collapsed by at least 40 percent in September and has continued to slump this month, poultry farmers were more robust. They have accused the authority of spreading unjustified fears and demanded the resignation of Koëer.

So much for the great European experiment, an impartial food safety authority which was going to cut through the self-interest of national politicians, beholden to their lobby groups. This was to be the "brave new world" of the impartial Platonic guardians who were to deliver the best, most reasoned and impassionate advice to keep the embattled consumer informed. As it is turning out – just as we argued at the time of the formation of this monster – it is just another "scare factory" which muddies the waters at a crucial time, and leaves consumers even more befuddled and confused.

Mind you, reading through the cuts this morning, Koëer needs little help. The newspapers, in their own way, are continuing to spread alarm and despondency – and ignorance.

Here, the piece by David Derbyshire, self-styled "Consumer Affairs Editor", in the Telegraph (link above) is a classic example of the genre. He writes:

Although attention has been focused on the spread of avian flu to Britain, health officials remain more concerned about the risk of a human pandemic. They fear that the H5N1 virus could mutate into a human form of flu that spreads easily from person to person. Because there is no immunity to the virus in people, it could kill tens of millions of people.

Thus spreads not the influenza virus but a more virulent form of disease – ignorance – which pervades both government and much of the commentariat. On offer is this thesis that the H5N1 virus could "mutate…" etc., etc., but this is not how it is likely to happen – if it happens at all.

While indeed viruses do constantly mutate, the chances of there occurring a spontaneous mutation of one the specific sub-types (or clades) of the H5N1 group – so as the emergent strain retains its virulence characteristics and develops an affinity to man, as a host – is so remote that, to borrow Pennington's phrasing, it is "for all practical purposes, zero".

Reviewing the latest scientific texts on the evolution of infectivity in influenza viruses, the more likely scenario is one where simultaneous infection occurs in a single host with a specific clade of the H5N1 virus and a human adapted influenza strain.

As the viruses disassemble in the human cell – as part of the mechanism by which the replicate – and them re-assemble, they can end up swapping genes, by which means an avian adapted virus can acquire characteristics which confer on it the ability in infect man.

Crucially, this can only occur under very limited circumstances, which presumably explains why H5N1 viruses have been circulating for over ten years, without any signs of them becoming human host adapted.

However, given that it could happen, the points at which it will most likely occur is birds which have close contact with man (i.e., domestic fowl) which then become co-infected with human influenza and H5N1, or people in close contact with these birds who have the opportunity acquire both viruses.

In epidemiological terms, this is vital information. If the disease breaks out into the human population, it is most likely to be seen first in poultry workers or other occupational groups which have close contact with birds. These groups are our "sentinels" who should be watched very closely for signs of disease, isolated and tested at the very first sign of their developing flu-like symptoms.

But, for all the intellectual firepower devoted to this problem, both at national and international level, we have the scientific director of the EFSA prating about a non-existent threat, while most of the energy and concern is focused on migratory wild birds. Yet, as far as the simple expedient of warning health authorities to watch out for poultry workers – and especially farmers – becoming sick, no advice has been given.

Rather like getting satellite television, when instead of suffering four channels of rubbish, you gain a further hundred or so extra rubbish channels, it seems spreading food safety competences to the European level, and multiplying the number of officials involved, also multiplies the rubbish.

COMMENT THREAD

040406BirdFlu[i-040406BirdFlu]The Telegraph today has picked up the story we ran last night, awarding it front page status, with the headline: "Vets admit mix-up over parrot tests".

"Government vets," says the story, were accused of an embarrassing mix-up which may have thwarted the effort to discover how potentially lethal bird flu arrived in a quarantine facility in Essex.”

The rest of the story is somewhat muddled but it is interesting to see that the incompetence of Defra is fast causing an international incident. The news agency AFX is reporting a "Taiwan quarantine official" saying that their own tests "undermine UK bird flu suspicions", with results in from the farm that exported birds to Britain. They have found no trace of the virus in the facility.

Some 40 birds on the farm in central Taichung county were examined and none were positive for bird flu, says Chiang Hsien-choung, an official at the Bureau of Animal and Plant Health Inspection and Quarantine. This, he says, shows “that it was unlikely birds exported from the farm had spread bird flu to others in British quarantine.”

From AP, via the Scotsman the story develops with news that Taiwan is to raise an official protest with Britain over Defra's allegations, following a robust statement from Chiang Shien-tsong, who is in charge of disease control at the Cabinet-level Agriculture Council. "We will lodge a serious protest to Britain for the irresponsible allegation," he says.

Chiang adds that the Taiwanese farm exported 185 birds in September after being issued an official certificate attesting they were free from viruses, including the H5N1 bird flu strain. These actually arrived on the 27 September at the Essex quarantine facility, while the parrots had been there since 16 September, and the two which have caused the furore were not found dead until 19 October.

The time line alone tells you that it is most unlikely that the Taiwanese birds were linked to the infection and now the data from the Taiwanese authorities further suggest that once again Defra have jumped to unfounded conclusions.

Thus, the Taipei Times is taking no prisoners on the issue, recording Taiwan's representative in Britain as demanded an explanation "Debby Reynolds saying before test results were out that the Taiwan birds carried H5N1 has not only seriously hurt Taiwan's international image but also exposed negligence in Britain's quarantine," Lin Hsin-yi said in an interview with the BBC

"We demand a report and an explanation from Defra and at the same time express our gravest concern to the British government," he says.

Yet this is the dire organisation which forms our first line of defence again the disease breaking through into the human population, if indeed that can happen. It does not exactly fill one with confidence.

COMMENT THREAD

reynolds[i-reynolds]While the EU's standing veterinary committee in Brussels was doing what it does best – banning something – in this case all commercial imports of live wild birds, another drama was being played out at Defra headquarters in London.

The venue was a private briefing given to MPs by Debby Reynold, Defra's chief vet (left), to update them on department's action on avian influenza but, after a Janet and John summary, one MP at least got down to action and started asking some serious questions.

This was Owen Paterson, shadow junior agriculture minister, who was particularly interested in the fate of not one but two ex parrots, as revealed by the department's own press release issued two days ago and reported on this blog.

Readers will recall that, contrary to media reports, not one but two parrots were sampled by Defra and, unaccountably, the samples were pooled for testing, as a result of which Defra cannot tell which of the two parrots (or both) was actually infected.

More to the point, under questioning, a flustered Debby was unable to confirm the source of the second parrot, saying only that an "internal inquiry" was being carried out to discover why the samples were mixed in what appears to be a typical Defra blunder – of the order of mixing sheeps' with cattle brains.

The significance of this latest blunder, of course, is that, on the basis of the known ex-parrot having come from Surinam where there has been no H5N1 reported, the department has constructed a "working hypothesis" that the infection came from birds from Taiwan in the quarantine facility, despite there being no reports of H5N1 there either.

This hypothesis has already invoked the wrath of Yeh Ying, the Taiwanese deputy director of the bureau of animal and plant health inspection and quarantine, who has called British veterinary experts "irresponsible", and with another ex-parrot involved – of unknown origin – this drives an even larger cart and horse through the department's theory.

Thus, Yeh Ying's comment that: "The British authorities do not have solid evidence while making a statement implicating the possible source of a bird flu virus in another country," is proving to be more accurate than she first imagined, and provides a further demonstration that about the only thing that Defra is any use for is killing animals. Ying, in fact, has got Defra down to a tee… "dangerous and irresponsible," were the words she used.

COMMENT THREAD

deadparrot1[i-deadparrot1]While the news on avian flu has been largely dominated by the discovery of an ex-parrot, as Monty Python would have it, struck down by the H5N1 virus, it has largely escaped attention that the UK no longer has the power to take unilateral action and must go cap in hand to Brussels for permission to ban further imports of pet birds.

This was confirmed this lunch time when the presenter on BBC World at One asked chief vet Debby Reynolds "...if Europe doesn't agree, is there any way that Britain could act on its own?" Her answer was blunt, and to the point: "No".

But, as we pointed out in our last substantive post on the issue, this is by no means the only thing being missed by the media at large, in what has developed into a classic health scare.

Media speculation, however, is not helped by the lack of detail in the official communications, such as the DEFRA press release on the ex-parrot, which talks of the "highly pathogenic H5 Avian Influenza virus" being found in the unfortunate bird.

But the release then goes on to announce that the "closest match is a strain identified in ducks in China earlier this year," adding, "it is not so similar to the strains from Romania and Turkey. It is not a strain that the Veterinary Laboratory Agency has seen before."

To compound the confusion, we also learn that the tissues from two bird samples were pooled in a single sample, so we are not actually talking about a single ex-parrot. Says DEFRA, "It is not possible to say whether both or only one of the birds was infected with the virus at this stage." Duh!

The Department's "working hypothesis" is that any infection in the birds from Surinam is likely to have arisen in the quarantine system, most likely in the facility in Essex where the Surinam birds shared airspace with the birds from Taiwan.

This hypothesis has invoked the wrath of Yeh Ying, the Taiwanese deputy director of the bureau of animal and plant health inspection and quarantine. She has called British veterinary experts "irresponsible" for saying a South American parrot picked up the infection from Taiwanese birds in British quarantine.

"The British authorities do not have solid evidence while making a statement implicating the possible source of a bird flu virus in another country," she said. "It's very dangerous and irresponsible."

It would help, of course, if the authorities made it clear to the media – and others – that the H5N1 description does not apply to a single virus, but a group of increasingly divergent sub-types or "clades", as Booker sought to do in his column yesterday.

Reports, he wrote, that the "lethal H5 strain" of the virus has reached Britain, via a now-dead South American parrot are so vague as to be meaningless. Millions of birds in Britain have been exposed to the "H5 strain". Even the more precise term "H5N1" does not name a distinct virus but a group of linked sub-types, only one of which has so far proved lethal to humans - and that has never been identified outside Hong Kong, Thailand and Vietnam.

He adds: "The H5N1 group has been around in densely populated areas of east Asia for at least 10 years; and, contrary to popular misconception, the tendency of viruses is not to become more virulent but the opposite (for the sound evolutionary reason that it hardly promotes survival to kill off your host)".

For those who can wade through the impenetrable thicket of scientific jargon, one of the most revealing accounts of the state of play can be found in a paper published by the US Center for Communicable diseases. Amongst other thing, this states that, while "H5N1 viruses from human infections and the closely related avian viruses in the 2004-2005 outbreak… belong to a single genotype," genes from the 2004 and 2005 outbreak "showed two different lineages of HA genes." These are termed clades 1 and 2. A further "clade 3" has also been identified, making three distinct subgroups, with human infection so far being confined to clades 1 and 3.

The fascinating finding here is that Viruses in each of these clades are distributed in "non-overlapping geographic regions of Asia" – in other words, they form distinct viral populations with their own separate distribution (shown on the map here). And, as can be seen, Taiwan is so far free from any isolates.

All this suggest, as we have tried to indicate, that this is far from the black and white picture of the spread of a single "killer virus", inexorably creeping towards the UK, poised to kill millions. In fact, we are dealing with the patchy, almost random distribution of a group of viruses with different characteristics, presenting different (and poorly understood) levels of threat.

In fact, from past history, it may not be any one of the viruses that presents the greatest threat, but DEFRA – which brought us the destruction of 11 million animals in the Food and Mouth epidemic – and the EU Commission which so expertly administers, amongst other things, the Common Fisheries Policy.

With such skill and expertise around, we had better hope that, indeed, the H5N1 viruses do present a great deal less of a threat than some of the more excitable commentators have indicated.

COMMENT THREAD

Tamiflu[i-Tamiflu]Although we are a tad underwhelmed by the bird flu scare, some people are doing very nicely thank you out of the increasingly strident alarums.

According to Bloomberg, Roche Holding AG, the manufacturers of the anti-flu drug Tamiflu, have reported a third-quarter rise in sales of 20 percent, partly as a result of the demand for the drug.

Revenue rose to 8.82 billion Swiss francs ($6.78 billion) from 7.37 billion francs a year earlier, the Swiss-based company said. That beat the 8.44 billion-franc median estimate of eight analysts surveyed by Bloomberg News.

The company now expects its drug sales to grow at least 10 percent this year and that the operating profit margin will be better than that in 2004. As they say, it's an ill wind that blows nobody any good.

COMMENT THREAD

Hearse[i-Hearse]It's groundhog day again, with virtually the same stories running today on the EU as there were yesterday, and the day before, and the day before… with the headlines still dominated by bird 'flu. Here, for some reason, the EU has declared the disease a "global threat", following a meeting for foreign ministers chaired by Jack Straw.

Quite what Jack Straw can offer by way of a response to this potential but unlikely "pandemic" is anyone's guess, but there you are. When it comes to this sort of thing, everyone's an expert.

Unwilling to record yet again, the growing dispute between the French and Peter Mandelson over agriculture subsidies, we cast our eyes further and happened upon a report of a seminar in Warsaw, sponsored by the Polish foreign minister on the future of the European Union. Oddly enough, the report was published by Xinhuanet, the Chinese news agency.

Anyhow, the Polish foreign minister, Adam Daniel Rotfeld, told delegates that to solve its problems, the European Union needs not only good management, but also effective leadership. Also, without unity and solidarity, EU countries could not further push forward the integration process, Rotfeld added.

After weeks of unremitting gloom, we are suddenly mightily encouraged: good management and effective leadership? From the EU? Not a chance. If Rotfeld is right, then truly, the EU is doomed. Oh happy days – we've even got the hearse lined up.

COMMENT THREAD

bird%20flu[i-bird%20flu]The papers today are full of the latest apparent spread of the avian flu virus into Greece, not least in the early edition of The Times.

According to this report, "the first case of bird flu has been found in the European Union after the detection of the H5 virus in a turkey in the Greek island of Oinouses". The report continues that preliminary tests of nine birds in the island have identified the virus as H5, but more rigorous testing is being carried out to determine if it is H5N1. This is described as "the deadly strain most feared as a possible source of a human flu pandemic."

We are told that tests are also being carried out in Macedonia after the deaths of more than 1,000 poultry at the weekend, days after the discovery of "the lethal virus" in nearby Romania and Turkey.

What appears to be the gradual progression of this virus has been accompanied by excitable predictions from the usual cast of characters which brought us dire warnings of hundreds of thousands of deaths from BSE. One such is Sir Liam Donaldson, the Chief Medical Officer, who has predicted that 50,000 Britons could be killed if this disease transferred to humans.

However, no one has yet topped the prediction from senior World Health Organization (WHO) official David Nabarro who, last month, warned that a bird flu pandemic could break out at any time and kill between 5-150 million people.

In the European Union, measures are being fronted by Health and Consumer Protection Commissioner Markos Kyprianou, who is spraying out instructions and recommendations with gay abandon and is about to outline plans for a Europe-wide simulation of a flu pandemic to test countries' preparations.

However, to his credit – or the good sense of his officials - Kyprianou is stressing that there is no need for panic. And well he might. The subject, as always, in the hands of semi-literate hacks is creating far more heat than light. This is a far more complex issue that they will allow for, and there are a number of issues which need to be borne in mind.

Firstly, the so-called H5N1 "strain" is not a single virus type but a closely linked group of sub-types, some with distinct characteristics. The isolates recovered from humans in Hong Kong and Thailand have all belonged to one specific sub-group which, to date, does not appear to have broken out of Asia. Therefore, the "deadly strain" recovered from Greece is most likely to be exclusively an avian strain of the virus, with no history of infecting humans.

Secondly, as always, this type of virus is prone to rapid evolution. The signs are that the H5N1 group is evolving into diverse and distinguishable groupings. And while the emerging mutations may adapt to man and acquire virulent characteristics, the virus has now been around in densely populated areas of China and Asia for at least ten years. So far, it has shown no signs of developing these characteristics.

Thirdly, while evolving virus may pose a potential threat to man, through increased virulence, mutation and cross-species adaptation does not necessarily involve transfer of virulence characteristics. In fact, an emergent virus, host-adapted to man, could well be benign, causing mild or even sub-clinical infection.

Fourth, in the continued evolution of viruses and other pathogenic agents, selective pressure is towards attenuation of virulence. The most successful pathogens are those which do not cause serious illness. This affords the greatest opportunities for transmission as the host remains mobile and in circulation. Virulent viruses, with very high mortality rates, rarely spread beyond the first foci of infection, as the death of the hosts limits opportunity for spread.

On this basis, the implications of the current "emergency" are most probably less profound than is indicated by the media and some of the shroud-waving medics.

Summing up the current situation, it is entirely conjecture that the sub-group of the virus which is potentially harmful to humans has been found in Europe. Most likely it has not. While the virus will most certainly continue to evolve, it is entirely conjecture that any mutation will necessarily be accompanied by any increase in pathogenicity to man, or that it will be virulent.

Then, it is entirely conjecture that a virulent strain, if it emerges, will necessarily spread rapidly. Apart from its effect on limiting host mobility, severe illness is more likely to be recognised early and contained, limiting the opportunities for geographical spread.

In this context, much is made of the huge mortality in the 1918 flu pandemic, although it should be remembered that the virus hit a population weakened by years of war, poor nutrition and inadequate, overstrained medical services, without access to modern, anti-viral drugs.

All said and done, therefore, we are dealing with conjecture, upon conjecture, upon conjecture. The balance of probabilities is that we will not be afflicted with a "pandemic" derived from one or other of the H5N1 virus sub-groups. The greatest threat is the serious economic damage in the national poultry flock. As much damage – if not more – however, may be cause by an over-reaction to a relatively low order of threat.

Over-reaction, of course, is something in which the EU commission specialises, so it will be interesting to see whether Kyprianou maintains his equanimity, or succumbs to the growing but – so far – entirely unwarranted air of panic that the media seems intent on fostering.

COMMENT THREAD

The news of the moment… in South Africa (there doesn't seem to be any worth reporting in Europe, which seems to have shut down for the duration) is that the government has ordered a mass ostrich cull. Some 30,000 are due for the chop in the Eastern Cape, following the discovery of a mild strain of bird 'flu.

Readers will be pleased to know that the effect of the South African ostrich industry will be "quite minimal" as the cull represents only a small percentage of the country’s exports of 300,000 ostriches a year.

Agriculture ministry official Segoati Mahlangu said, "This is to safeguard our international credibility", adding that the EU had been notified and they had fully supported the measures.

The burning question for today therefore is whether – if we slaughter our ostriches – we could improve our credibility with the EU. If so, perhaps we should start with Stephen Byers.