SteamedPenguin

Since the discovery Virus H5N1 colonizes humans and very often causes death Governments, media outlets, blogs, and just about everyone started panicking about a human pandemic. Now we can sit back a bit and better examine H5N1 with some objectivity. Panic is never the friend of Systems Analysis.

Forbes reports on Japanese-American research on where H5N1 likes to colonize. It appears that the virus prefers the lower lungs instead of upper respiratory system. This, at once, explains why the virus is almost always deadly and why it doesn't transmit easily from human to human. Being so low in the lungs means that it isn't going to get coughed up easily, and it means that treating it is very difficult. It causes viral pneumonia which frequently is the cause of death.

Why is this important? H5N1 could mutate to colonize the upper respiratory tract, but if it prefers and lower lungs for colonization it is possible that moving up the respiratory tract would weaken it by making it easier to treat as well as making its territory more dry and less protective in general. Imagine animals that are used to wet, lucious forest land having to more to open grassland and being showered by poison at the same time.

So what about the people who died from bird flu. News outlets like to stream headlines like 'death toll at 103'. Color me unimpressed. We have more people dying of plain old influenza per month than died of bird flu since we have kept track. More important is the reason why they died. It appears that their viral loads were very high and they were high because they were in close proximity to birds with H5N1. Aha! Now we have a better picture of the system.

Birds die from H5N1, humans can die from H5N1. So far so good. Virus jump species barriers. Also good. H5N1 has jumped species. Also good. This doesn't mean that we are all going to die from H5N1. Living organisms are lazy. It is a fundamental part of biology that you don't want to waste energy and you don't want to expend it unless you can be certain that the payoff will cover that debt. Otherwise it isn't worth it. Why would H5N1 make the jump to being able to colonize the upper respiratory tract? What evolutionary processes are pushing it towards that?

I am not a virologist or a biologist. So don't look for really awesome answers here. This is a thought excersize instead of a definitive answer. I'll make some guesses:

H5N1 is flaring up in birds and it'll do so for some while until it comes into better equilibrium. The weakest birds will die, stronger birds will breed resistance. H5N1 will adapt so that it doesn't kill 99% of its preffered hosts. After a while things will calm down again to occasional flares of bird influenza. As for humans, we are most likely not facing a pandemic, at least not from H5N1.

Even though I am an American citizen, and currently reside in the US I am a perpetual foreigner. I look at the US through the eyes of a well-informed outsider, almost an insider, yet always evaluating things from the outside. I don't identify as US citizen except in the legal sense, and US citizens don't necessarily treat me like fellow US citizen.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina I keep looking at people around me and I do not see any undue horror that thousands of their fellow country people are dead. This in itself is somewhat incomprehensible to me, but hey, judge not lest you be judged says the good book. Perhaps millions of US citizens just keep their emotions hidden. Or perhaps the sadness is just too much, or whatever, I can't come up with more excuses.

OK, so maybe sadness is the wrong angle. Maybe I should be looking for different reactions. Should US citizens be outraged? Maybe not. It isn't like any government can do anything about natural disasters. They just happen, right? And New Orleans being hit with a category 4 hurricane is not something that was ever predicted, right? Hell, this storm was such a fluke, a one in a billion chance of this happening. Nevermind that scientists have been talking about this for years. Articles have been written, scenarios drawn up, and recommendations made. Nobody took it seriously enough apparently to do something about this.

At this stage I don't know whether people in the USA even get outraged about anything except their precious little right to bear arms and the price of gasoline. Well good, now they can take their SUV's and their rifle and drive through New Orleans.

OK, so outrage is beyond the emotional repertoire of US citizens. Maybe fear is something they understand. After 9-11 every red-blooded American was out to go get somebody for New York. Never mind that many US citizens avoid anything related to New York like the plague, probably would never go anywhere near the Twin Towers, and generally speaking despise the self-absorbed, provincial, and somewhat snooty denizens of New York City. I can't say I blame them; that garbage-strewn, rat infested shithole called Manhattan gets way too much play in the news anyway. Yet after 9-11 everybody was embracing New York City like a long lost cousin they secretly had a crush on. Hell, for some people New York only became as a real place when 19 shitheads decided to murder several thousand US citizens, and do some charity demolition work by removing two eye-sores from the NYC skyline. Suddenly New York stopped just being a set for Law and Order and became a city, not just any city. A city for all Americans.

For a while the getting was good. Some sheep herders in some country most US citizens can't spell, never mind find on a map, got killed from afar. Towel heads, camel jockeys, and other assorted 'Arab' looking people got shot, and that seemed to do wonders after the big bummer of having a US city bombed.

Let us contrast this with New Orleans. Perhaps up to twice the number of people killed in NYC are dead and dying in New Orleans. Over a million US citizens are internal refugees. A city is close to being wiped out. Yet the response is somewhat tepid. That's right, after having a US city bombed once all of the USA is jaded. So tragically hip they can't even scrape enough wits together to contemplate their own danger.

The Massacre of New Orleans is a study in how a system does not work. Ultimately it is not important whose jurisdiction is preserved, what authority is granted, or which agency is responsible. From the city government up to state government all the way to the top office in the federal level there has been a massive dereliction of duty. Thousands of US citizens were left to die due to the incompetence, negligence, apathy, and sheer stupidity of all the systems involved. The lack of a systematic, thorough, and pre-prepared evacuation plan points to the willful negligence of the responsibilities that are inherent of governing bodies. The sheer amount of deaths was preventable, and as it was not prevented responsibility for the dead lays on the shoulders of so many governing bodies.

OK, so as a country the USA says, OK screw the New Orleans people, that's what you get for living in a city under the sea level. OK, but that is not the point. The point is that despite the bad location of New Orleans, disasters of similar magnitudes can happen at a number of places, and yet people are not putting one and one together to understand that a repeat of the negligence of New Orleans can happen in any city. Hell, New Orleans would have been better off had it been a terrorist attack, maybe then the cowboy Administration of George Bush would have ridden in with horses and six-shooters to make the bad guys go away.

What is so tragic is that this is a systems failure. It is never beautiful when systems fail because for the most part the idea is that you design a system not to fail, or if they fail for unforeseen circumstances that they fail in a gradual manner so as not to take out everything lest the failure of the system be more catastrophic than the even itself. Having proper evacuation plans is not something governing bodies can ignore, especially as cities get bigger and bigger and evacuations become more difficult.

The biggest tragedy of it all is that several thousands of US citizens were allowed to die in such a cruel and callous manner in the richest nation on the planet. Calling it anything less than a massacre is not possible.