Why a military lockdown would make the Bird Flu worse

[Guest guest]

Hawks vs. Chickens: Why a military lockdown would make the Bird Flu

worse by Kerry Howley, Reason Magazine

Here's what we know about avian influenza: It may savage the global

human population, or it may restrict itself to savaging the chicken

population. If the virus evolves to jump from human to human, it may

wreak untold suffering, or weaken and disappear. The antiviral drug,

Tamiflu, may be our salvation, or it may prove useless. Scientists

are hoping for a vaccine, which we may be able to develop, or not.

Prognosis? In the words of World Health Organization official

Nabarro, " the range of deaths could be anything between five and 150

million. "

Avian influenza is the most malleable of news stories, a loose

collection of " what if? " conjectures, apocalyptic scenarios, history

lessons and science-based guesswork. Faced with potential panic,

Southeast Asian governments have shaped the facts at will. Thailand,

Indonesia, and China initially avoided panic by simply lying about

outbreaks. Vietnam complies with the WHO but insists on vetting

information before handing it over. Myanmar explicitly forbids the

local press to report incidents within its borders (though any

mention of the flu striking rival nations, such as Thailand, is

encouraged.)

The message from the White House, meanwhile, has been exactly what

one would expect in a situation rife with bad information,

questionable statistics, and the vague potential of mass destruction:

Send in the troops. President Bush says that idea came to him after

reading The Great Influenza, Barry's account of the 1918 flu

pandemic that killed 100 million worldwide. " Who [is] best to be able

to effect a quarantine? " Bush asked at a press conference this

month. " One option is the use of a military that's able to plan and

move. "

It's a somewhat surprising conclusion to draw from Barry's book, in

which we learn that the 1918 flu exploded inside military camps and

then bled into the civilian population. The situations are different,

of course; in 1918, hundreds of thousands of troops were packed

together in cantonments in Georgia, South Carolina, Massachusetts and

elsewhere, tinderboxes for a disease that strikes hardest at the

young and healthy. President Bush and the director of the Centers for

Disease Control and Prevention are suggesting that the military be

used to enforce a quarantine, presumably some sort of lockdown that

would cordon off unsafe areas and restrict the movement of people on

both sides of the line.

Economist and blogger Tyler Cowen, who has written extensively on the

subject for his avian flu blog, notes that after months of thinking

and writing about the virus " Bush's idea had not crossed my mind. " An

enforced quarantine, suggests Cowen, is more likely to spread the

disease than stop it. Those charged with enforcing the order—in this

case, the military—are as likely to be carriers as anyone. In

contrast to SARS, flu carriers can easily spread disease without

knowing they're infected.

Cowen isn't totally averse to the idea of a quarantine, but there are

diseases for which a quarantine makes sense, and diseases for which

it does not; countries in which quarantine is plausible, and

countries in which it is unthinkable. He suggests quarantines might

be effective for small countries (as with American Samoa in 1918)

that can conceivably shut their borders and close the airports. A

country of 300 million, dotted with densely packed cities, bounded by

porous borders—not so much.

It is the rational response of any community hit by disease to clear

the streets and retreat inside, and that is largely what people did

in 1918. But quarantines can be counterproductive in that they induce

panic, encouraging people to flee before their options run out.

Hundreds of thousands fled Beijing during the SARS epidemic when

rumors of quarantines circulated more quickly than the epidemic

itself.

More cracked than the idea of an enforced quarantine is the blithe

suggestion that men and women trained to kill outside U.S. borders

are the ideal candidates for dealing with vulnerable flu victims

stateside. The Great Influenza is, as much as anything, a work that

limns the dangers of ignoring the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, which

bans the military from taking police action in domestic situations.

The 1918 flu struck at a time when U.S. forces were repeatedly asked

to keep order at home, and repeatedly trampled individual rights to

do so. The War Department was busily and brutally quashing strikes,

U.S. army intelligence operatives were gathering intelligence on

suspicious Americans, and government officials actively encouraged

Americans to inform on one another.

The information freeze was, in Barry's telling, a major contribution

to the spread of the epidemic; no one wanted to bear bad news and

risk hurting morale. Speech was restricted through an expanded

Sedition Act, and if someone was going to shut you up, it would more

than likely be the military. To read Barry's account, consider the

dearth of facts surrounding the current epidemic-in-waiting, and

cry " call out the cavalry! " requires a special kind of hyper-

militarized mindset.

Barry's explanation of why so many of the young and healthy fell prey

to flu is perhaps the most chilling paragraph in a deeply disturbing

book. " Young adults have the strongest immunes system in the

population, " he explains, " most capable of mounting a massive immune

response. " The response was often more harmful than the disease; it

was often the body's cure, in other words, that killed. Overreaction

can be deadly. That, if anything, is a history lesson worth learning.

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Kerry Howley is an assistant editor of Reason.