Tapu Misa: Don't run for the hills yet

What with scientists predicting that Mt Taranaki is about to blow its top any minute now, the Reserve Bank Governor warning that our economic downfall is being hastened by our spendthrift ways, the non-coalition coalition Government already squabbling over seating arrangements in Parliament, and that flu pandemic projected to wipe out 30,000 of us in the not too distant future - it's been quite an uplifting week..

Really, is there any reason to get out of bed? If our public health officials are to be believed, bed is probably the safest place to be right now - especially, if we're denied the cheering effects of retail therapy.

Just exactly how panic-stricken should we be? Not very, apparently.

I'm strangely comforted by the news that Scotland is the birthplace of the H5N1 virus, that it made its debut in a chicken from an Aberdeen farm, and that it's been around since 1959.

And so far, despite the dire predictions and the 100 or so people who've contracted the virus (from, it would appear, their feathered friends) and the 60 or so who've died from it, bird flu is still mostly lethal for birds. To morph into that pandemic category, says the World Health Organisation, H5N1 has to have the ability to "spread easily and sustainably among humans" - and so far, there's no indication that's happened.

As Wendy Orent, the author of Plague: The Mysterious Past and Terrifying Future of the World's Most Dangerous Disease, put it in the LA Times last week, pandemic panic is still a little premature. Even if the virus is showing signs of spreading between people, which it isn't, it's unlikely to replicate the scale of destruction wrought by the 1918 virus. Orent writes that the 1918 virus, which killed 50 million people worldwide, acquired its adaptive and lethal qualities in the trenches of the Western Front during World War I.

"According to evolutionary biologist Paul W. Ewald of the University of Louisville, its lethality evolved in the trenches, the trucks, the trains and the hospitals of World War I. Infected soldiers were packed shoulder to shoulder with the healthy. The Western Front was a disease factory, and it manufactured the 1918 flu. The packed chicken farms of Asia are a close parallel. H5N1 evolved the same way as the 1918 flu did in the trenches," wrote Orent.

But H5N1 shows no signs yet of developing into a human disease - or of ascending the heights of the "supremely adapted" 1918 virus. Orent seems almost admiring of the world's deadliest virus, which was recreated by scientists at the Mount Sinai Hospital in New York.

"The sublime malignance of the 1918 virus doesn't lie in one part but rather in how the genes function together. Evolution shaped this virus to be a sleek, effective killing machine." (Disciples of intelligent design may have an entirely different hypothesis for its beautiful deadliness.)

In any case, says Orent, even if H5N1 had the ability to spread easily between people, "it needs a Western Front to become more than ordinary".

In other words, don't run for the hills just yet.

In a week of depressing news, the worst for me concerned a fellow journo, John Manukia, whose career came ignominiously unstuck last week, after he fabricated an interview with former South Auckland policeman Anthony Solomona.

Manukia is a graduate of a Manukau Polytechnic journalism course that, it was hoped, would help even up the ethnic imbalance in the country's newsrooms. I thought him a talented writer, and an able reporter - if perhaps a little too shy and bottled-up. He seemed also to lack the kind of single-minded drive that distinguishes the real newshounds from the rest of us and seemed always to be distracted by the weight of family and church commitments.

John told his bosses at the Herald on Sunday that he felt pressured to perform. Newsrooms aren't renowned for their collegiality, or as places where talent is patiently nurtured. They can be brutal, unforgiving environments where sensitive souls have to toughen up or shrivel. It's even harder when that sensitive soul is the lone Pacific Islander (or Maori), who's expected to earn his keep by coming up with the Pacific Island stories that no-one else can get. An interview with Solomona, who'd steadfastly refused to talk to anyone, would have been a great coup.

I don't seek to excuse or condone Manukia's actions. I doubt he ever seriously thought he'd get away with it, but then I don't think he was thinking rationally.

Does this have wider implications? Instances of outright fabrication are hardly new in journalism, but they continue to be relatively rare. Yes, we stuff up more times than we care to admit, but despite public perception and our own shortcomings and short-sightedness, most of us care enough about the truth to feel physically sick when we find that we've made a mistake, even a relatively minor one.

That said, there are obviously exceptions. Like the controversial New York Times reporter Judith Miller, who's the subject of many column centimetres of scathingly critical copy from fellow journalists.

Only a few weeks ago, Miller - who has famously described herself as "Miss Run Amok", because she was given free rein by her paper's publisher - was a heroine of press freedom for opting to spend 85 days in prison rather than reveal the identity of a source. Now she's looking decidedly tarnished, as evidence mounts that she was more an uncritical mouthpiece for the Bush administration than a champion of journalistic integrity.

Miller insists she has done nothing wrong. Could she help it if her sources were wrong? Yes, says New York Times columnist, Maureen Dowd, in an unsympathetic op-ed piece headlined, "Woman of Mass Destruction: Investigative reporting is not stenography."