Financial Post (Edmonton, Canada) October 26, 2005 AVIAN MADNESS By Peter Foster Health ministers from around the world were quarantined yesterday at a "Bird Summit" in Ottawa as potentially lethal policy ideas threatened to mutate out of control. The avian flu "situation" confirms that -- thanks to the virulent spread of the precautionary principle -- you just have to mention the word "pandemic" and the media gets hysterical, bureaucrats start empire building, policy-makers get stupid and -- most dangerous of all -- governments get larcenous. Newspapers, including the National Post, yesterday carried a half-page ad from the CBC's The National asking "Is Canada Ready?" It carried a photograph of a man apparently strangling a dove. The man was obviously intended to be a doctor, apart from one detail: His nose was outside his surgical mask. Duh. The ad also carried the words: "Disaster strikes all over the world, when it hits Canada will we be prepared?" But what disaster? Word is that we could be on the point of a pandemic that would rank with the Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918, which offed tens of millions. Are we? For a start, in 1918 nobody knew what a virus was. Nevertheless, a new strain of avian flu, H5N1, has been discovered in birds and has led to the known infection of about 120 people in East Asia, about half of whom have died. How significant is that? The alleged danger is that the virus might mutate into a form that could be spread between humans, and might then run out of control. That's two "mights." As it stands, the only way to contract H5N1 is apparently to do what the guy in the CBC ad is doing: getting down and dirty with a bird. The human infection comes via contact with excrement on feathers. Those who have caught the disease so far have been chicken pluckers, cock-fight organizers, children with pet ducks and others who are around when the feathers fly. Indeed, since many millions of birds are thought to have been infected and the number of human cases is so low, the World Health Organization has pointed out the "species barrier" to acquisition of the virus is "substantial." That, however, is not the impression that is being given. It's all pandemic, all the time. The award for Bureaucratic Alarmism-By-Extension has to go to Canada's Integrated Threat Assessment Centre, which has produced a report suggesting the avian flu might be used by Osama bin Laden in his campaign of global terror. Watch out for swarthy young men in nightshirts plucking chickens on the subway. The Stupid Policy Award has to go to Italy, which introduced a mandatory poultry labelling program indicating where chickens had been raised and slaughtered. They might as well have required a skull and crossbones to be branded on the birds. The result has been a precipitous dive in chicken consumption. In fact, health officials have made clear that avian flu cannot be transmitted by eating poultry or eggs. Nevertheless, France's foie gras manufacturers, too, are now shaking in their boots. The most worrying, although predictable, suggestion to have emerged in Ottawa this week is that pharmaceutical patent rights might have to be overturned to deal with the "crisis." After all, people have to come before Big Pharma profits. Health Minister Ujjal Dosanjh declared on Monday -- with a predatory smirk on his face -- that there might have to be some "technological transfer," admitting that the phrase was just a "euphemism for loosening the patent laws." Which is a euphemism for theft. He added "we shouldn't be judgmental if people are dying." Thus does looting vaunt itself as ethics. A couple of years ago, a distraught father walked into a downtown Toronto hospital with his sick daughter and pulled out a gun to expedite attention. Mr. Dosanjh's "compulsory licensing" policy (another euphemism) comes into the same category. The potential victim in this case is Swiss pharmaceutical company Roche, developer of Tamiflu, a drug that has proved to be effective against H5N1. (Mr. Dosanjh also supported a plan for developed countries to share 10% of their Tamiflu stockpiles with poor countries. Great idea, but how will Mr. Dosanjh explain it to the hundreds of thousands of Canadians who will, as a result, be deprived of treatment?) If Roche was flagging in production or refusing to sub-licence the drug, there might be cause for concern. But it isn't. Indeed, it has already donated a significant stockpile of Tamiflu to the WHO, ramped up production fourfold in recent months and expressed willingness to issue further sub-licences. Above all, as a recent Wall Street Journal editorial points out, expropriation or the threat of expropriation -- especially when added to hidebound bureaucracy and a predatory tort system -- means fewer new drugs will ultimately be available. "Our political class has spent the past 30 years driving the vaccine industry out of business with its own virus of over-regulation, price controls, litigation and intellectual-property abuse." And that's the really scary consequence of this week's meeting in Ottawa. Copyright National Post 2005 Copyright 2005 CanWest Interactive