Where Have all The News Reports Gone?

For flubies, who follow flu news with a passion, the past 10 days has seemed like a black hole of information. After a flurry of activity in Indonesia, we’ve heard virtually nothing for more than a week. There is precious little news out of Africa. And China? The only thing we’ve heard is that reporters who report on `sudden’ events, such as disasters or emergencies, without first clearing the story with the central government, will be fined the equivalent of $12,500.

Well, that isn’t quite true. We did hear of a trial of a whistle blower in China, a government official who reported a bird flu outbreak, which resulted in his imprisonment. No good deed in China goes unpunished.

Of course, this is the summer, and during the short history of H5N1, the months of June-September have been slow. Three years ago, there were virtually no reported outbreaks. Last year, a few. So it is to be expected that things may be slow this summer.

But the abruptness of the halt of the news is a bit unnerving. Governments worldwide continue to prepare, the warnings continue to emerge from officials not to let our guard down, and billions of dollars are being spent by private and public organizations to prepare for an eventual pandemic.

It is a truism among flubies that the virus never sleeps. It is endemic in poultry in much of the world, it mutates with regularity, and it is poised to erupt again at any time.

The worry is that while containment of the virus seems an impossibility right now, containment of the news is achievable, and is ongoing.

Obviously, there are no major human outbreaks going on. At least none in areas of the world where testing is taking place. But that leaves many areas of the world, where health care is non-existent, or funding is lacking, where outbreaks could be going on. We simply don’t know. With 6,000 people dying each day on the African continent, most of whom are simply buried without having seen a doctor, we have no idea what is really going on there.

This lack of news, for many, is unnerving. Others find comfort in it. Myself, I look at it with a strange ambivalence. It proves little.

We are probably due to go thru a long, hot summer, and the news will likely only come in dribs and drabs. We could wake up one morning to find a real mess somewhere in the world, but the likelihood is that won’t happen until at least the fall.

We should all use this time to prepare. Consider it a temporary reprieve.

But it would take one helluva a miracle for this threat to go away and turn this into a full pardon.