Is Bird Flu Back?

It seems like only yesterday when we were all supposedly going to die from bird flu. Or was it sars? Actually, the last pandemic scare was back in 2005.

The latest scare, coming from eastern China, is a new form of bird flu—H7N9. So far, 28 people have been found with the disease, according to China’s state-owned news media. Eight have died. Most of the cases are from Shanghai, but others are several hundred miles away. Tens of thousands of birds in the area have been culled.

Is this an outbreak we need to fear? It could be, but it’s too early to tell. H7N9 has a number of features that make it dangerous. It has emerged quickly and is spread over a wide area. Most importantly, is has not been found in humans before. This means we have no immunity to it. If the disease starts transmitting from person to person, it could spread very quickly.

A second problem is that unlike H5N1, this flu is very mild in birds. If a bird population became infected with H5N1—the old bird flu—health authorities quickly knew about it because a lot of birds started dying. But H7N9 could spread far and wide without much notice. “This means stopping animal-to-human transmission is impossible,” said Masato Tashiro, from the Influenza Virus Research Center in Tokyo. If the virus becomes widespread among animals, which it may have done already, it could be recurring in humans.

The good news, though, is that there is no evidence that the virus has been transmitted from human to human. As far as we know, every human who has caught the disease got it from an animal. As long as this remains the case, the virus won’t become a pandemic.

But this could change. The virus already has mutated so that it can infect mammals. The more humans come down with the disease, the greater the chance that it will mutate and spread between humans. For some solid advice on how to watch this news story develop, see this post by Maryn McKenna, author of Superbug at Wired Science Blogs.

“Humanity has never been widely exposed to H7 or N9 flu viruses, and so lacks resistance to these subtypes,” writes Nature. “If a pandemic were to occur, it would probably have a severe toll. But it is too early to predict how events will unfold; experts in emerging infectious disease are only just becoming acquainted with the latest villain in their roster.”

Even in this era of modern medicine, we are still vulnerable to a pandemic.

It is easy to dismiss headlines about the next pandemic because the last few scares have not killed millions of people. But scientists know that the potential is there—and Bible prophecy warns us to expect it.

For more information on what the Bible says about a potential disease pandemic, read “Is Bird Flu Really a Threat?”