Paul Thomas: No, we can’t negotiate with a virus

Checked the front page lately? It's all bad.

The bean-counters are predicting that the economy will make a hard landing next year. That's not as bad as a crash landing but it's no picnic. Put two or more economists in a dark corner and it won't be long before they're whispering the R word - recession.

The kiwi dollar is to exporters what concrete slippers are to a Mafia rat and there's nothing the Government can do about it.

This winter's flu vaccine might not get here on time and might not work anyway and the brain-drain has become a torrent.

Oh yes, and if there's a bird flu pandemic, 3700 New Zealanders will die.

How big is that if? The World Health Organisation says we're in "the gravest possible danger". Experts, of whom there's never a shortage, are apparently unanimous that a bird flu pandemic is inevitable. It's not a matter of if, but of when.

That 3700 looks pretty rubbery, as these figures tend to do. It's a number spat out by a computer that's been force-fed a tonne of information, some of it unreliable, and a host of assumptions, some of them dodgy.

But unlike many of these computer-generated death toll projections - passive smoking being a prime example - this one has history on its side.

The 1918 flu pandemic accounted for 8250 New Zealanders. Worldwide, more people died of flu in a few months in 1918 than in the four years of World War I. In fact, 3700 is down at the sober, conservative, let's-not-go-overboard end of the scale. A Wellington School of Medicine research project came up with 6000 deaths from 20,800 cases of serious illness.

The British Government envisages some 50,000 deaths - four times the normal annual flu death rate - in Britain, the equivalent roughly of 3300 here.

But Professor Hugh Pennington, professor emeritus of microbiology at Aberdeen University and a leading authority on the subject, regards that prediction as scandalously complacent. The real figure, he insists, would be more like two million.

That's one person in every 30, which, in New Zealand terms, works out at about 130,000.

To put that in perspective: 51 people died in the Wahine disaster; 256 were killed by the Napier earthquake; 257 died on Mt Erebus; 843 died on the roads in 1973; 2700 Kiwi soldiers died at Gallipoli; about 27,000 New Zealanders were killed in the two World Wars.

I know next to nothing about bird flu or pandemics and am deeply suspicious of medical scare stories and scientific "research" that, on closer examination, turn out to be little more than educated guesswork with an in-built bias towards whatever constitutes respectable opinion within the scientific community.

That the results are then seized on and trotted out as "scientific fact" by various busybodies who want to treat the rest of us the way they treat their children is another good reason to be deeply and rudely sceptical.

But it makes you wonder. We live in a world convulsed by the American's war on terror, which was set in motion by an outrage that killed 2792 people. The overarching justification for this war is the need to prevent terrorists from getting their hands on weapons of mass destruction.

There's a widespread view that a chemical, biological or nuclear terrorist attack is, like a bird flu pandemic, inevitable.

It would be interesting to compare the level of effort and resources that have been and are being deployed to reduce the likelihood and scale of these looming cataclysms.

Many would argue that you can't compare the two. Terrorist attacks excite our revulsion because they're man-made; they happen because individuals choose to make them happen. A pandemic, such as the tsunami (283,543 and counting), comes under acts of God and, if you like, goes with the territory.

Road deaths can't be blamed on God but they also go with the territory. We accept that the convenience and mobility of being able to jump in a car whenever we please comes at a price - accidents will happen.

Last year's road toll was 435. If 1973's ratio of deaths to vehicles on the road still applied, that figure would have been more than 1500. The reason it wasn't is that we have put a lot of effort and resources into ensuring that accidents don't happen quite so often.

Both terrorism and bird flu pose serious threats to humanity and the question is: why are we taking one so much more seriously than the other? If the projections are remotely valid, it would take al Qaeda and its affiliates several decades and more fiendish plots than I've had hot breakfasts to achieve the body count that bird flu could chalk up in a matter of weeks.

And we can't say we haven't been warned. The fact that these apocalyptic warnings don't seem to have penetrated the public consciousness is, I suspect, partly the scientific and medical community's own fault. They cry wolf like a stuck record (remember Sars?) so its hardly surprising that the global village takes little notice.

Perhaps we've become blase about living with the idea of megadeath. For 40 years the world went about its business under the constant and very real threat of nuclear annihilation.

But there was a grain of comfort in the doctrine of mutually assured destruction (MAD). We put our faith in mankind's rationality and survival instinct and didn't dwell on the possibility that those old men with their fingers on the button might have been irrational or indifferent to the fate of the species.

Notwithstanding the security apparatus mantra that you can't negotiate with terrorists, history suggests that, whether out of mutual exhaustion or for tactical reasons, the adversaries usually end up at the negotiating table.

But thus far no one's been able to initiate a dialogue with a virus.