Nature can sometimes do worse things than capitalism. An earthquake kills 40,000 in a few minutes. A tsunami wipes out 200,000 in hours. And now the Department of Health contingency plan for bird flu in Britain is contemplating a ‘not impossible’ 750,000 deaths if the H5N1 virus goes pandemic. The government is buying up 14m doses of Tamiflu, a general-purpose antiviral and probably not very effective prophylaxis against a virus strain that hasn’t evolved yet, which in any case won’t be available until April next year and is only enough to treat 25% of the UK population. Meanwhile the United Nations is facing wildly varying estimates of the death toll, from 150m from its own advisors to a paltry 7.4m from the WHO, while newspapers range from tabloid ‘We’re all doomed’ sensationalism to an ‘It’ll be alright on the night’ conservatism from the better informed but possibly more complacent qualities.
A pandemic may well be on the way. The government Chief Medical Officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, has announced his estimate of 50,000 ‘excess’ deaths (over and above the average annual death rate of 12,000 each flu season), stating: “We can’t make this pandemic go away, because it is a natural phenomenon, it will come.” However, other scientists dismiss the figure of 50,000 as a complete guess. “It could be worse, it could be better. I think initially it could be worse than that”, says Dr Martin Wiselka, consultant in infectious diseases at Leicester Royal Infirmary.
(BBC News Online, Oct 16).
The problem is that everybody is guessing, and governments are not willing to spend money on hunches. Currently H5N1 has an exceptionally high mortality rate of 50%, but is very hard to transmit, especially from one human to another, which is why only 60 people worldwide have so far died. The current guess is that the most likely threat is from H5N1 recombining with ordinary flu during the annual winter flu season. This is known to have happened during the Spanish flu outbreaks of 1957 and 1968, when the hybrid strain was much less deadly but spread very rapidly and thus killed more people. On the basis of this guess, a best-case scenario, the government plans to rely on its standard seasonal vaccination programme for at-risk groups including children, old people and asthmatics, with the additional purchase of the Tamiflu antiviral drug just in case. However, new research is showing that the 1918 pandemic, the deadliest ever recorded, which killed between 20 and 40 million people, was a pure bird flu, not a hybrid, and that H5N1 is evolving in ominously similar ways. The 1918 virus infected almost everyone on the planet within a year of its appearance, and without the aid of modern transport and cheap mobility. (New Scientist, October 8). Donaldson dismisses comparison with the 1918 pandemic because antiviral drugs and other advanced medical practices were not available then, yet many scientists are worried that the pandemic could spread so rapidly that it will outrun any attempt to contain it, and the government in any case has rejected plans to curtail population movement as largely pointless.
Capitalism is no more to blame for bird flu than for the recent earthquake in Kashmir, however it can be criticized for its way of dealing with natural disasters and threats. In capitalism, whatever the urgency, nothing can happen until agreement has been reached over money. As one example, the EU is currently unable to spend any money on purchasing vaccines and antiviral drugs because, according to officials, Britain is blocking agreement on the overall EU budget for 2007 to 2013 (Guardian, Oct 15). In another less publicized example, scientists have expressed horror that the team which has recreated the 1918 virus, ‘one of the deadliest viruses of all time’ have been testing it in live mice at only the second highest level of containment, and without wearing protective suits. The obvious question, when it is known that Soviet scientists in the 70’s accidentally released a mild member of the 1918 family of viruses into the environment, is: why not the highest level of containment? The answer can only be cost. If there is a chance to keep cost down, even if it involves a risk, capitalism will exert pressure to take that chance. It would be an incredible irony if H5N1 turned out to be a case of mild sniffles but we all died anyway from an artificially recreated laboratory virus because somebody tried to save a few quid from their research budget.
Nature can sometimes do worse things than capitalism. But to fight them and protect ourselves, we need something better than capitalism.
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