HUMAN PANDEMIC FEARS WAY OVERBLOWN CLAIMS

FRIED CHICKEN MORE DANGEROUS THAN BIRD FLU INFECTED CHICKENS

$1 BILLION FOR PANDEMIC, $250 MILLION TO FIGHT CANCER

CANADA : It would be better to spend the hundreds of millions of dollars being allocated to fight a human bird flu pandemic to where it is needed most urgently, the front lines of public health where threats already exist.

This is the advice of Dr. John Blatherwick, Vancouver's medical officer of health.

Dr Blatherwick thinks the threat of a human bird flu pandemic is so low that, "I wouldn't put it on anybody's radar."

"When you put a billion dollars against something like this, it's disproportionate to the threat ... The greatest danger that chickens pose is the fried type, that people continue to eat and get fat on."

Smoking and the fact not enough people in Canada wear seat belts pose far great public-health issues, he believes.

From Canada's National Post : "Federal and provincial health ministers met this past weekend to co-ordinate their pandemic planning, agreeing among other things to boost Canada's national stockpile of the anti-viral drug Tamiflu to 55 million doses, from 16 million.

"The Conservative government's first budget, unveiled this month, devoted $1-billion over five years to pandemic readiness, compared with $250-million for a new cancer-control strategy.

"...H5N1 bird flu first killed a human nine years ago this month -- and still has not adapted itself for person-to-person transmission."

"'There really is not a good scientific basis for believing that we are in imminent danger of a severe pandemic, which is basically the line we are being given by the World Health Organization and a lot of other pundits,' said Dr. Richard Schabas, a former chief medical officer of health in Ontario.

"He believes the microbiology discipline has for the past decade fallen under the influence of ideas championed in The Coming Plague. The 1994 book by award-winning American journalist Laurie Garrett argued that man-made changes to the Earth's ecology -- from war in Africa, to shrinking Amazon rain forest and widespread injection-drug use in America -- had left humans dangerously vulnerable to a vast array of infectious diseases.

"But Ms. Garrett's fears have proven largely unfounded, as threats ranging from Ebola to Lassa virus and SARS have been vanquished relatively easily, argues Dr. Schabas, now medical officer of health for Hastings and Prince Edward Counties in Ontario.