Social Effects of H5N1 - Political

Political

"Everything you say in advance of a pandemic is alarmist; anything you do after it starts is inadequate." - US HHS Secretary Michael O. Leavitt

H5N1, like everything else, is subject to political spin; wherein every interest group picks and chooses among the facts to support their favorite cause resulting in a distortion of the overall picture, the motivations of the people involved and the believability of the predictions.

Donald Rumsfeld, formerly United States Secretary of Defense, is a past board member and current minor shareholder of Gilead Sciences which owns intellectual property rights to Oseltamivir (also called "Tamiflu"). In November 2005, George W. Bush urged Congress to pass 7.1 billion in emergency funding to prepare for the possible bird flu pandemic, of which one billion is solely dedicated to the purchase, and distribution of Tamiflu.

Believers in Antoine Bechamp, homeopathy, and other alternative medicines widely disbelieve mass media reports sourced from conventional medicine and governments.

Some believe The deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu is essentially a problem of industrial poultry practices.

Others have a more nuanced position. According to the CDC article H5N1 Outbreaks and Enzootic Influenza by Robert G. Webster et al.:"Transmission of highly pathogenic H5N1 from domestic poultry back to migratory waterfowl in western China has increased the geographic spread. The spread of H5N1 and its likely reintroduction to domestic poultry increase the need for good agricultural vaccines. In fact, the root cause of the continuing H5N1 pandemic threat may be the way the pathogenicity of H5N1 viruses is masked by cocirculating influenza viruses or bad agricultural vaccines." Dr. Robert Webster explains: "If you use a good vaccine you can prevent the transmission within poultry and to humans. But if they have been using vaccines now for several years, why is there so much bird flu? There is bad vaccine that stops the disease in the bird but the bird goes on pooping out virus and maintaining it and changing it. And I think this is what is going on in China. It has to be. Either there is not enough vaccine being used or there is substandard vaccine being used. Probably both. It’s not just China. We can’t blame China for substandard vaccines. I think there are substandard vaccines for influenza in poultry all over the world." In response to the same concerns, Reuters reports Hong Kong infectious disease expert Lo Wing-lok saying, "The issue of vaccines has to take top priority," and Julie Hall, in charge of the WHO's outbreak response in China, saying China's vaccinations might be masking the virus." The BBC reported that Dr Wendy Barclay, a virologist at the University of Reading, UK said: "The Chinese have made a vaccine based on reverse genetics made with H5N1 antigens, and they have been using it. There has been a lot of criticism of what they have done, because they have protected their chickens against death from this virus but the chickens still get infected; and then you get drift - the virus mutates in response to the antibodies - and now we have a situation where we have five or six 'flavours' of H5N1 out there."

Keeping wild birds away from domestic birds is known to be key in the fight against H5N1. Caging (no free range poultry) is one way. Providing wild birds with restored wetlands so they naturally choose nonlivestock areas is another way that helps accomplish this. Political forces are increasingly demanding the selection of one, the other, or both based on nonscientific reasons.

In addition, some have called for tax breaks due to H5N1. A May 7, 2006 report from India E-News states that: "Pakistani poultry farmers have sought a 10-year tax exemption to support their dwindling business after the detection of the H5N1 strain of bird flu triggered a fall in demand and prices, a poultry trader said. We have asked the government to give us tax exemption on income from the poultry business for at least 10 years to meet losses caused by the bird flu scare, Abdul Basit told DPA. Basit, vice president of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry (LCCI) in the country’s commercial hub of Lahore, was part of a delegation of the Pakistan Poultry Association, which met food ministry officials to present their demand. The federal poultry board of the food ministry is to meet on May 9 to consider the tax-cut demand for the poultry business in the upcoming national budget due in mid-June."