Shoo away, bird flu: Panic won’t find home here

When I was in the third grade, a Jesuit who taught at Gonzaga University came to dinner at our house. I told him I worried every day about World War III. He said, “You are a child. You are too young to be worried about World War III.”

He was right, but I couldn’t help it. In first grade, during the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, we had a nuclear war drill at St. Charles School on Spokane’s North Side. We were told to run home as fast as we could. If it took longer than 15 minutes, then those children would stay sheltered at school in the event of a nuclear blast. The less-than-15-minute children could run home.

I usually rode the bus, but there were no buses that day, so I walked in a confused state to family friend Peggy Swift’s house a block away from school. When Mrs. Swift answered the door, I collapsed in tears.

My fear of World War III was born that day. It persisted throughout my childhood. I worry about today’s sensitive, high-strung first-graders who will fret when they hear predictions of a deadly bird-flu epidemic. I worry about the childhood joy they’ll lose to anxiety.

So I am declaring this column, after today, a Bird Flu Safe Zone. I won’t mention it here again.

Thursday, in an online chat at www.spokesmanreview.com, Dr. Kim Thorburn of the Spokane Regional Health District addressed the question of whether the flu scare is just Y2K revisited.

She said, “Influenza pandemics tend to be cyclic, historically occurring every 20 to 30 years. The last influenza pandemic was in 1968, so the odds say that we’re due.”

She urged preparation, not panic, and the science she based her answer on is compelling and factual, just as the science of nuclear destruction was compelling and factual in 1961. The bird flu pandemic could happen, just as the United States and Russia could have blown each other away during the Cold War.

But they didn’t, because it’s rarely the stuff we fear that gets us. Sometimes, it’s worse.

The 1918 flu epidemic killed between 500,000 and 675,000 people in the United States. In our library archives, I skimmed The Spokesman-Review from 1917. Tuberculosis was a concern, as was malaria. Coyotes were blamed for an outbreak of rabies near Ellensburg. And in a medical advice column, a woman complained about her unusual menopause symptoms – “a sense of suffocation and dread of impending evil.”

Not one article warned about a flu epidemic, because it appeared so abruptly and unexpectedly the next year.

In 1980, when I was a reporter in Delaware, a public safety official showed me an old nuclear fallout shelter where the government stored boxes of crackers two decades before. I ate one of the crackers. Stale and tasteless.

Throughout 1999, people stored tasteless dried food in their basements in preparation for the predicted nervous breakdown by the world’s computers on Jan. 1, 2000. The sky did not fall.

Yet less than two years later, madmen flew airplanes through the sky into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. Few predicted this could ever happen, and no crackers were stored against it.

I refuse to fear bird flu for another reason: Our society’s problems are often solved in unexpected ways. American Heritage magazine reported that officials in the late 19th century worried enormously about the public health menace stemming from horse manure piled high on city streets. They brainstormed many solutions, except this unforeseen one: Automobiles eventually replaced all the horses.

World War III might still happen. And the bird flu might alight on the Inland Northwest, forcing me to eat crow – pardon the pun.

But in deference to that nervous first-grader still inside me, and out of respect for the real first-graders among us, I’m not running to the worry place anymore. There, a sense of suffocation and impending evil resides. I’ll take my chances, along with some joy, and remain here in denial.