MGG Pillai Commentary View

<< Previous || Next >>

Are bird flu and other potential pandemics man-made?

THERE IS WORLD WIDE interest these days in bird flu as there was four years ago of bio-terrorism, each threatening, so health authorities maintained, the deaths of millions of people. Bio terrorism did not come to pass. Neither will bird flu. The only beneficiaries will be the pharmaceutical companies and the authorities who keep their people glued to television sets so that they can do as they like. If a pandemic is threatened, individual countries would have strengthened their health regimen so that it does not spread. They have not done so. The people panic unnecessarily at these health concerns made worse by authorities assuming the worst but doing nothing about it. The people are left with half baked advice on television, radio and newspapers on how to cope with the pandemic should it ever strike. But bird flu has killed less in the whole of Asia these past two years than daily road deaths in the United States. The United States have killed about 100,000 Iraqis deliberately and have lost more than 2,000 in the conflict there. But that does not count in these calculations. Saddam Hussein, we are told, is a evil figure and his people's death is necessary to him out. The only beneficiary of this bird flu scare is the pharmaceutical industry. That stories appear daily of the threatened pandemic. A pharmaceutical product is miraculously found which is out of reach of Asians Africans and Latin Americans. But the pandemic in time will be no more. Another one will take its place, and the pharmaceutical industry laughs all the way to the bank.

If the poorer countries take in additional medical and health personnel and improve the health of their citizens, the possibility of their transmitting the pandemic to other countries will not not rise. But it is not buttressing the health personal in developing countries that should be the central aim of these threats of pandemics. The central reason for these diseases are to sell cures. First frighten the people all over the world of the pandemic about to strike the people, then tell them of reports of, say, bird killing in, as has happened, in the Netherlands and elsewhere, talk of the economic loss these have caused, and other irrelevant issues, the a laboratory cure is reported, with how difficult it is to get that cure fast enough to the rest of the world at prices affordable. There is the spectacle now of the United States demanding the cure at special rates, which is not allowed those in the poorer countries. Many in the poorer countries are also burdened with other high medical bills, normally they cannot afford as these poorer countries have adopted the notion that the people should burden further with health bills. Those in government of course need not pay these outrageous prices. They are cocooned by government legislation from paying these outrageous bills. The system is so fixed that it is the poor who paid the bill.

There is no universal health care in poorer countries. They take life as it comes. If a person should die because of bird flu or other pademics, then so be it. There is the usual sorrow of course, the more so when television cameras are round, but death holds no terrors to these people. It is part of life, as it is not in the developed countries. The governments, barring a few, are not interested in the poor. The more so when they are taken care of, and expensive medicine is given them at a fraction. Corruption is the more the poorer the country. The funds they collect are rarely sent to those who badly need them. Malaysia never admitted that it was struck with tsunami, as Thailand and Indonesia was. But it was, and out of the press because the victims were fishermen and poor people in the north western states of peninsular Malaysia. The aid was given to Indonesia and Thailand and none to Malaysia's victims. But Malaysians gave aid to the fund thinking it was was the local tsunami victims. The aid for the quake victims in Southeast Asian earthquakes was few and far between. Much of the aid there was by private groups.

But the bureaucracy lopped off much of the aid, and only a fraction given to those who suffered the most, and for whom foreigners had given the aid. It seems the aid syndrome, particularly after a tragedy, is to make the governments look good, especially when these governments beg for it. But begging in these circumstances is allowed by the governments, not by its peoples. There are laws in Malaysia against begging, and people do appear in court and go to jail for doing just that, but the government does it all the time. It is excused for doing it. Malaysia looks to the West, as most countries do. But North Korea and Burma has refused. North Korea recently told private aid groups to leave the country if the United States will not rebuild the nuclear plant it is forbidden to build. The United States, of course, will not, so North Korea has ordered the private aid groups out. The few Western reporters talk of unfed childrean and one-track mind of its people. But you can find it in those countries which get aid. India, for instance. These two countries develop at their own pace, and will not listen to advice forced on it. Cuba did that and today has the best health care system in the Americas, the United States included.

The Third World talks, seemingly intelligently, of the bird flu strain, HN51, and others causing the pandemic. But are these strains forced on the world, and affected the birds? Many people, including in the West, believe that the bird flu strains, like AIDS earlier, is a bio-war experiment released inadvertly into the public domain. The existing cures do not work on them. The AIDS strain that caused so much panic all over the world came into the public domain by accident. It is prevalent among homosexuals in California and among a single African tribe in Africa when a vial dropped, and the African carried it across the laboratory in South Africa, were the US Army had a research laboratory. He wiped it off, and it was that contamination which spread. In Malaysia, the former prime minister formed an AIDS fighting, and Malaysians supported it not because of belief but who was organising it. AIDS is not a problem in Malaysia, although Malay youths are likely to get it more often than the Chinese or Indian. The pharmaceutical industry won, because it replaced the multi-use syringe used for more than a hundred years by single-use syringes. But the cause of this pandemic, like others, for which easy cures are not available, is deliberate release of the strains into the public domain. There has ben AIDS, bird flu over and other potential pandemics over the centuries without world wide panic. Why should it start now, with a new potential pandemic following the old?

M.G.G. Pillai
pillai@streamyx.com