BOOK REVIEW
Epidemic of bird flu books Everything You Need to Know about Bird Flu & What You Can Do to Prepare
for It by Jo Revill
Buy this book
Reviewed by Dinah Gardner
Books about bird flu are breeding almost as fast as the H5N1
virus can replicate itself inside a bird's gut. Last year we had How to Survive
the Bird Flu, The Bird Flu Preparedness Planner, Bird Flu:
Everything You Need to Know and my personal favorite for sheer
scare-mongering, The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu.
The latest to join the flock is Jo Revill's, which neither defuses the media
hype behind the disease nor offers much more than can be gleaned from some
careful surfing on the World Health Organization website.
The paperback, written by the health editor of Britain's Observer newspaper,
charts the evolution of the disease from its first suspected appearance in 1996
in China to the situation today when it has become endemic in Asia and has
spread to pockets of Europe.
It explains how the virus kills humans - the lungs flood with immune cells
(cytokine) and the patient drowns in what's known as a cytokine storm - but
stresses that the vast majority of those of who might catch the disease during
a pandemic will likely come down with no more than a very severe case of flu
that will knock them out of action for about three weeks.
It also examines how the world is preparing for a possible pandemic and
discusses emergency measures such as whether security forces will impose
quarantine on those who fall sick, who will be given priority to scarce
supplies of vaccines and how a mass mortality plan might be formulated - or
more simply what to do with all the dead bodies.
Revill also dips into some interesting side issues - likely inspired by some of
her Sunday features in the left-leaning Observer. In the first half of the
book, she discusses how catastrophic it would be if poverty-stricken regions of
Africa, so far H5N1-free, were to be hit by bird flu; how mass poultry culls
may lead to worsening malnutrition rates in the developing world as relatively
cheap sources of protein - chicken and eggs - are wiped from markets in
Southeast Asia; and how the West - namely the US - has been dragging its heels
in helping the nation worst affected by the disease to date, Vietnam.
More chillingly, Revill suggests that in the event of a pandemic, rich nations
will pump money into developing vaccines that will simply not be available to
poorer countries such as Cambodia and Vietnam.
At times, Everything You Need to Know about Bird Flu reads like a
dumbed-down TV news report. Revill tackles such absurdities as, "My daughter
has a pet budgie. Should I still let her touch it?" And she devotes two-thirds
of a page to explaining how to wash your hands with soap and water - 30 seconds
minimum and use dry towels, in case you didn't know.
Despite claiming to go beyond the sensational headlines, the language of
Revill's pseudo-scientific book is littered with words designed to instill
fear. The virus is variously described as lethal, devastating, ominous,
insidious, an elusive invader, the perfect form of bioterrorism, and most
alarming of all, the killer in the rice paddies (my emphasis).
It's not a case of "if", it's "when" a pandemic will appear. And that, she
warns, will be within two years.
But scare-mongering and dramatics aside, Revill does dish up the key facts in
an accessible and easily understood manner. She explains why bird flu is
potentially so dangerous - "H5N1 has been picked out as the flu subtype where a
mutation into a fully 'humanized' strain is most likely to occur and cause a
pandemic simply because the reservoir of disease is so great" - what "H5N1"
actually means, how it could develop into a humanized form, how the drug
Tamiflu reduces the severity of symptoms and how it might become impotent later
on, how bird flu is likely to be spread and how quickly an effective vaccine
could be developed - apparently four to six months after outbreaks begin.
The main problem with this kind of book is that the story is changing so fast -
death tolls rise, more discoveries are made about the disease and the drugs
used to treat it, and outbreaks spread and recede. While this review was being
written, the disease claimed its first fatality outside Asia - a 14-year-old
boy from Turkey who worked on a poultry farm.
Although it has been updated to December, the shelf life of Everything You Need
to Know about Bird Flu may prove to be shorter than the future of a
chicken caught with a cold.
Everything You Need to Know about Bird Flu & What You Can Do to Prepare for
It by Jo Revill. Rodale International, 2005. ISBN 1-4050-9573-3. Price
US$12, 224 pages.
Dinah Gardner is a freelance journalist based in Beijing.
(Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us
for information on
sales, syndication and
republishing .)
virus can replicate itself inside a bird's gut. Last year we had How to Survive
the Bird Flu, The Bird Flu Preparedness Planner, Bird Flu:
Everything You Need to Know and my personal favorite for sheer
scare-mongering, The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu.
