The Incredible Disappearing Bird Flu Panic

Remember the wall-to-wall coverage of the menace of bird flu? Remember the international conferences about it? Remember all the frantic and ominous pronouncements? Remember?

Oops, just kidding.

LONDON - Earlier this year, bird flu panic was in full swing: The French feared for their foie gras, the Swiss locked their chickens indoors, and Americans enlisted prison inmates in Alaska to help spot infected wild birds.

The H5N1 virus — previously confined to Southeast Asia — was striking birds in places as diverse as Germany, Egypt, and Nigeria, and a flu pandemic seemed inevitable.

Then the virus went quiet. Except for a steady stream of human cases in Indonesia, the current flu epicenter, the past year's worries about a catastrophic global outbreak largely disappeared.

What happened?

Part of the explanation may be seasonal. Bird flu tends to be most active in the colder months, as the virus survives longer at low temperatures.

"Many of us are holding our breath to see what happens in the winter," said Dr. Malik Peiris, a microbiology professor at Hong Kong University. "H5N1 spread very rapidly last year," Peiris said. "So the question is, was that a one-off incident?"

Some experts suspect poultry vaccination has, paradoxically, complicated detection. Vaccination reduces the amount of virus circulating, but low levels of the virus may still be causing outbreaks — without the obvious signs of dying birds.

"It's now harder to spot what's happening with the flu in animals and humans," said Dr. Angus Nicoll, influenza director at the European Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.

While the pandemic has not materialized, experts say it's too early to relax.

I'm not saying that governments should not be prepared for things like this at all, by the way. In general, this is one of the things government is meant to help cope with. But at times these hyped up scares end up being counterproductive. In the long run they wear people down and tend to make it more likely a real threat will be disregarded. The boy Who Cried Wolf is a fairy tale with a real life lesson in it. Aesop wasn't a stupid man.