United Nations Reports
Success in Containing Bird Flu in East Asia
News comes days after alarmist ABC movie
capitalized on fears of a global pandemic.
By Ken Shepherd
Business & Media Institute
May 15, 2006
Bird flu, fodder for a Chicken Little disaster movie on ABC last
week, is not ruffling feathers at the United Nations as areas
previously hit hard have contained the virus.
In Thailand and Vietnam weve had the most fabulous
success stories, U.N. pandemic flu coordinator Dr. David Nabarro
was quoted in the
May 14 New York Times.
Vietnam has not seen a single case in humans or a
single outbreak in poultry in 2006, while Thailand has not had a
human case in nearly a year or one in poultry in six months,
reported the Times Donald G. McNeil.
While the experts McNeil consulted for his article
warned that its premature to say the bird flu is wiped out, the
Times writer noted that this success in the former epicenter of the
epidemic proves that aggressive measures to contain avian flu can
work even in very poor countries.
On May 9 ABC aired Fatal Contact, a sweeps month
disaster movie which ended with an ominous note: a 100-percent
lethal mutation of the avian flu wiping out an Angolan village.
While that evenings Nightline attempted to weed out
fact from fiction by dissecting the bird flu movie, the Business &
Media Institute pointed out that
previous attempts
at solid reporting by the network had fallen flat.
The Business & Media Institute (BMI) has previously
documented the medias
pandemic of hype
in covering bird flu. Dr. Elizabeth Whelan of the American Council
on Science and Health, an adviser to BMI, also warned the public not
to panic in an
editorial.
