Is the bird flu over?

“Don’t just have it on your mind. Have it on your plate too!” So runs one of the series of advertisements that the ministry of health and family welfare and the department of animal husbandry are putting out in newspapers. One immediate consequence, perhaps, is that the country’s largest airline, Jet Airways, has announced it will be back to serving chicken and eggs in its non-vegetarian menus. While this is good news for the country’s poultry industry, the manner in which the entire episode of bird flu, or H5N1 to give the flu its scientific name, has been resolved leaves a lot to be desired. For, the ads don’t tell you if the bird flu is over, just that ‘well-cooked chicken and eggs are safe and healthy’. If you read between the lines, presumably that means the flu itself is not over. So, the ministry is not recommending chicken salami. Or is it?

To give the government its due, when the news of the flu first broke, its response was immaculate, and the teams of 200 veterinarians and specialists who were flown into the affected area of Navapur in Maharashtra, along with experts from the National Institute of Communicable Diseases (NICD), were clothed in protective gear complete with face masks, reminding you of Dustin Hoffman and his CDC team trying to control the Ebola virus in the film Outbreak. Poultry in that area were culled and buried deep, enough supplies of Tamiflu were rushed to the affected areas as well as those which had the potential, retail supplies were withdrawn since the first thing panicky customers do is to stock up on such drugs, and the ministry of health put up regular status notes on the flu, giving details of the tests done in each state. But everything after that looks as if it has been driven by politics rather than pure science. While both Parliament and the army decided to take chicken off the menu in its messes, the agriculture minister, Sharad Pawar, made it a point to eat chicken wherever he went and had his photographs taken while doing so. And while the ministry of health and the animal husbandry department got their websites to give regular updates with statements like “The situation is being closely monitored and under control” and “As on date there is no human case of Avian Influenza”, the scientific establishment (which is ultimately the most credible source on the matter) has maintained a very low profile.

The NICD website, unlike the more active ones in the ministry of health and the department of animal husbandry, does not have anything flashing on avian flu. When you do a search on the site, you get one item which is a posting asking what avian flu is, and even this was done in January 2004. Nothing after that. Search for H5N1 and you’re told “your search for H5N1 did not match any documents”. “Bird flu” doesn’t get you any results either. Of course that isn’t surprising when you see that the list of outbreaks investigated by the NICD end in 2002, and the “What’s New” section has three outbreaks—unknown disease, jaundice and new outbreak—all of which took place in March/April 2002. The government’s response in this case has been a lot better than the blind panic created in earlier cases, such as the Surat plague episode a decade ago. But if it has to carry credibility, the men in white coats have to be upfront, not politicians who are perceived to be always marching to a different beat. It may not be possible to set up the equivalent of the Atlanta-based Centre for Disease Control in the US, but it should certainly be possible to co-ordinate scientific activity at the different laboratories and make the official scientific position available to the general public, unfiltered.