Why The BIRD FLU Virus
May NOT Be As Nasty As Feared

This is not a great time to be a chicken due to the current outbreak of bird flu. But what about us humans? Should we be worried about bird flu? The science of natural selection tells us that viruses, like the bird flu, evolve to become less deadly. This is because if they don't, they kill their host animal too quickly and hence become extinct.

As long as humans don't live in crowded conditions like a chicken factory, the bird flu, if it ever mutates to spread between humans, should quickly evolve to produce milder, more typical flu symptoms.

Viruses need to move from animal to animal, otherwise they die within the animal they have currently infected. For a bird flu virus that has infected me to get to you, it needs to let me be relatively active and mobile so that I can cough and sneeze on you (when sitting behind you on the bus, for example). If the virus makes me so sick that I can't get out of my bed, then its chances of moving to someone else are seriously diminished.

A mutant virus that quickly kills you will not spread very far compared to a less lethal virus. Do you remember the SARS and Ebola viruses? These deadly viruses that were a threat to our civilisation disappeared from the headlines because they didn't live up to the reported fears. Both are spread easily between humans.

The SARS virus originated in Southern China in 2002, spread to about 30 countries, killed 800 odd people in a year and then vanished. Why? SARS had a mortality rate of 10 per cent and because it didn't evolve to become less deadly it killed itself out of existence.

So why did the "Spanish Flu" of 1918, the deadliest human flu pandemic in history, kill 40 to 50 million people in just one year? It happened because it coincided with World War I. Soldiers, because they were crowded into cold, wet and muddy trenches, spread the flu to each other easily. Sick soldiers were then transported to overcrowded hospitals.

However, as natural selection predicts, once the 1918 flu spread to the general population it evolved to become less virulent. If you have caught the flu in the past few years, chances are it was a descendant of the deadly 1918 flu.

But what about the experts telling us that a deadly pandemic is just a matter of time? That when the virus mutates and starts spreading between humans we are done for? If this happens the virus would either quickly kill itself off or evolve into a form that is not deadly. Unfortunately some people would die in the process, but a deadly pandemic anything like the 1918 flu is very unlikely. So, don't be a chicken.

For more commonsense information about the bird flu, see a simple and easy way to dramatically reduce your risk of catching the bird flu.