Migratory birds are flying

I believe that bird flu does not exist!

Have you forgotten about SARS yet? I feel like not everyone immediately remembered what we were talking about, right? And we are talking about the Plague of the 21st century, which can claim the lives of millions of people, causing monstrous damage to all humanity. Such are the things. And we even have a hard time remembering that it was there.

And there was a panic that gripped the planet since the end of 2002. Airports were closed, widespread quarantine was introduced, China and the countries of Southeast Asia tried to bypass and fly around like a plague barracks. Beijing received the right to host the Olympics in 2008, but it was seriously proposed to deprive it of this right. Well, in fact, how can you hold the Olympic Games, which will attract 10,000 athletes alone and tens of thousands of tourists from all over the world, in the very hotbed of SARS, as the super-disease was called, so as not to utter this language-breaking combination “SARS” every time. So what if the Games are still six years away, and in six years the Earth may already be in ruins, struck by a monstrous virus!

Ah, those were the times! Where is she now, this pneumonia? Beijing 2008 is still two and a half years away, but no one has remembered SARS for a long time. The world economy suffered billions of losses, the planet shuddered, Russia watched in suspense over the fate of the only person on our territory who either fell ill or seemed to have fallen ill with this ominous disease. What's the end result? The number of people infected around the world was several thousand, the number of deaths was several hundred. Approximately 85% of the casualties occurred in China. Every death is grief. But on a planetary scale, these victims are completely disproportionate to the panic that arose because of them.

This is the price to pay for a world in which an event that occurred at one end of the earth becomes known to the entire planet in a matter of hours and even minutes, when this enormous distance can physically be overcome in less than a day. The earth is big, but thanks to modern technology and communications, thanks to universal access to information, it seems very small.

Or here's a story for you, which is completely comical. Russians have been buying salt for the third week. In one single place, due to temporary inconsistencies, Ukrainian salt was suddenly not delivered to the stores. Someone started a rumor that in response to the gas war we declared on Ukraine, Ukraine, in turn, declared a salt war on us. It seems like nonsense, but it was enough for queues to form all over the country!

Salt is a product that you usually don’t notice in the house. I bought a pack, and it costs you a whole year until you eat it. Well, maybe you can buy another one in the middle of the year if you start pickling something, making supplies for the winter. The average Russian, according to experts, does not eat more than three kilos of this salt per year. Salt can be mined in almost any area. The capacity of our main salt producers is enough to cover the population's need for salt seven times. And in Ukraine they bought it simply because it was easier to deliver imported salt to those specific areas. And beyond the Urals and in Vorkuta, where people stood for salt even at night, Ukrainian salt has never existed! Nevertheless, citizens stormed the counters, signed up for queues and held roll calls, took forty-kilogram bags - and took the queue again. Forty kilograms of salt will last a person until 2020, but he buys salt as if he is going to eat it alone.

This is collective paranoia. And this is exactly what we are dealing with when we see everything that is happening in the world around the so-called bird flu. I am sure that there is no bird flu as a global threat. Although the disease itself, of course, exists. But this is the same as with SARS or with the disappearance of salt.

The victims of bird flu were not millions, not thousands, or even, in general, not hundreds. Even the most common flu kills many times more people in the world, and this very common flu, by the way, is transmitted from person to person. Not a single case of human infection has been recorded so far! But after cases of poultry infection appeared in Germany, several major politicians immediately proposed canceling the World Cup, which will be held here in June-July. Suddenly the virus mutates and spreads to the people. They say: yes, for now the bird flu is not transmitted, but suddenly it will start to be transmitted, and when it starts to be transmitted, thousands will get sick again and an epidemic will begin, and after it a pandemic, and then the bill will be in the millions! Now they found a dead swan here, a dead crow there, and three chickens died somewhere else.

Three fell ill - hundreds of thousands under the knife. Man is better than any epidemic in mowing down the feathered ranks. In short, all living things die! But are there too many “ifs”? Isn’t there too much fear of a more than hypothetical threat, despite the fact that there are many quite tangible problems and deadly diseases that we simply don’t have the time or desire to fight now? This does not mean that nothing needs to be done now and that there is no need to bother the population with stories about the death of birds, cases of infection, and the progress of the fight. But this does not mean that a bird’s fly should necessarily be inflated to the size of an elephant.