# 2130
The Summer of 2008 has, thus far anyway, been extraordinarily quiet on the bird flu front.
Part of that is due, no doubt, to the seasonal variation we see in bird flu activity. Summer has historically been a much quieter time of year for the H5N1 virus.
But I can remember no summer in the past three that has been this devoid of bird flu news.
Looking back at the first part of July of 2007, Vietnam was embroiled in an ongoing outbreak in poultry, and had seen 5 human cases reported in the previous six weeks. Before the month would end, they would record their third fatality of 2007.
Indonesia was still reporting cases, including their 81st fatality, a 6-year-old boy who reportedly had no contact with poultry.
Germany and the Czech Republic were both culling poultry after the discovery of the H5 virus in their nations. Siberia was reporting H5 antibodies detected in 50 wild birds, and India, Myanmar, and Bangladesh all reported bird flu outbreaks.
Even Egypt reported a human H5N1 case on July 22nd, bringing their total to 38 human infections.
Even though the dead of summer, there was a slow but steady drip . . drip . . . drip. . . of news.
While one could assume that the lack of news this year is simply a sign that the H5N1 bird flu virus is less active this summer than last, that may not be the entire answer.
Some of this year's decrease, at least in reports among poultry flocks, could be due to the rise in the number of asymptomatic infections in birds.
The recent Hong Kong culling was sparked, not by reports of sick or dying birds, but by the routine environmental testing of chicken dropping in the market which showed the H5N1 virus.
Up until now, we've depended upon bird die offs to serve as a signal that a flock is infected. If some strains of the virus no longer produce morbidity and mortality in poultry, we could well be missing the silent spread of the virus in some regions of the world.
We also know that some nations are no longer reporting bird flu incidents in the same fashion as they have in the past. There seems to have been a shift in policy, both stated and unstated, by a handful of countries around the world regarding how they talk about the avian flu threat.
Depending on one's viewpoint, this could be seen as a simple change in tactics, an unfortunate degradation in transparency, or in some cases, even outright censorship.
After years of dire warnings, and no emergent pandemic, some countries may be wondering exactly what is to be gained by publicizing their bird flu woes.
Talking publicly about outbreaks in poultry is bad for their economy, bad for tourism, and ultimately bad for their local leaders. And with human cases, even more so. For some, there may seem little incentive to remain transparent on these issues.
The status quo, with bird flu remaining a low-level threat, could go on for years. Some nations may now feel it is time to start to learn to `live with the virus', instead of continually trying to fight it.
Surveillance and containment is an expensive proposition. With world food supplies dangerously low, and the price of food rising, culling millions of chickens while your citizenry go hungry may soon be viewed as an untenable solution.
It already is a dangerously unpopular one.
How do you sell that idea to near-starving people? Especially if their birds don't appear sick?
At some point, this could even become a politically destabilizing policy.
Given the relatively low levels of human infections when compared to other threats such as Malaria, Dengue, and TB - and the high cost of combating it - we may be seeing an inevitable backlash growing among officials as they weary of this never-seeming-to-end battle against bird flu.
While Indonesia has been the most public about their refusal to release bird flu news, other nations seem to be shifting to lower profile releases of information as well.
It was, if you think about it, almost inevitable.
Egypt, for instance, recently reported in their OIE filing 10 outbreaks of the H5N1 virus in the past 90 days and the culling of tens of thousands of birds, yet that news never seems to make the media.
By filing with the OIE every 6 months, they are fulfilling their international reporting obligations, while at the same time, not drawing attention to the endemic nature of the disease in their country.
I'm sure, at the Egyptian Ministry of Agriculture, this is considered a win-win situation.
In Pakistan, we recently saw the spectacle of a Basic Livestock Officer named Mohammad Ibrahim who was made a scapegoat for revealing that the H5N1 virus had been detected on a farm in Swabi.
Never a shining example of transparency to begin with, Pakistan provoked the ire of international health officials with this blatant act. Ibrahim's immediate transfer to another district was a public punishment designed to send a signal to all other government employees to keep their mouths shut about avian influenza.
No doubt, it was effective.
Nations such as Iran, Myanmar and North Korea are closed societies, with little flow of news, and so we rarely know with any confidence what is going on within their borders. We get persistent rumors, but what really goes on there is unknown.
With the Olympics at hand, one can't help but wonder how controlled any unfavorable news reports are going to be coming out of China for the next couple of months.
The Chinese authorities, you can be sure, are not particularly anxious to allow negative news stories, particularly about a potentially deadly disease, circulate during a time when hundreds of thousands of visitors are flocking to that nation and the world watches in on TV.
One can't help but worry that the lesson drawn from their failed coverup of SARS in 2003 may not have been that such a policy was doomed to failure, but that it was possible to maintain it for several months.
And of course, Indonesia has made it very plain that it will not only not share virus samples, they will report human bird flu cases only when, and if, they want to.
As far as poultry outbreaks are concerned, they haven't filed an OIE report since September of 2006.
Indonesia has proven that nations can get away with this sort of misguided policy, and other nations may be lifting lessons from their playbook.
It would be comforting, I suppose, just to accept this lack of news as a good sign. And perhaps it is. Perhaps the virus really has quieted down, at least for now.
But it is also pretty obvious that the willingness of some nations to publicly acknowledge their bird flu problems has diminished over the past year.
It therefore makes it difficult to compare last year to this year.
A shift in policy away from transparency does not, of course, mean that there are outbreaks going on to which we are not informed.
It simply means there could be.
Our world's ability to combat the avian flu threat, however, is not enhanced by secrecy. Without ongoing surveillance, particularly in those parts of the world where the virus is most active, we run a terrible risk of missing early clues that a pandemic may be brewing.
We also may lose any opportunity, no matter how slim, of containing a pandemic outbreak should one erupt.
Any short-term gain to be had by minimizing, or under-reporting, bird flu outbreaks around the world are likely to be quickly erased once a serious outbreak occurs.
Of course, recognizing that requires looking beyond today, or sometimes even beyond tomorrow, and actually caring about what happens outside your own borders.
It requires taking the long view.
And as a species, we often aren't terribly good at that.
