Rolling the Dice on Bird Flu

Denial, resilience, déjà vu.

- Choire Sicha

EVERYONE HAS So much going on at the turn of the year family trips punctuated by someone getting a funny cough, New Year's regrets and resolutions, the agonizing stretch between January 6 and Inauguration Day through which to remain medicated. Many of us put up buffers to make it. But into your carefully guarded cone of quiet may come a news item with a whiff of terror. The eggs are suddenly expensive or have gone missing from the stores. Your local geese are wheezing themselves to death. You may hear the troubling phrase a rare flu coupled with the more disturbing in a child.

This shiver of déjà vu is brought to us by the current avian influenza outbreak. Since March, when the H5N1 virus was discovered in a single cow in Texas-the first time that a strain of the bird flu had ever been seen in cattle-it has popped up with increasing frequency, like jump scares in the haunted house of our food system: at poultry and dairy farms, in beef cattle, at meatpacking plants, in bottled raw milk. Then, in November, a teenager in British Columbia who was extremely ill with the virus, who had been all over the news, seemed to disappear: Around American Thanksgiving, the province's health department said the case had been closed and there would be no further updates. On November 19 in Alameda, California, doctors identified the first case of bird flu in a child in the U.S., and no one could figure out how it had happened. On December 12, scientists announced that horses could get it, too. On December 13, it was reported that two farmworkers in California had contracted the virus and that one person in Louisiana, with a backyard flock of sick birds, was seriously ill. And then a week before Christmas, California governor Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency over the outbreak, calling his decision a "proactive action"; it was intended, he said, to ensure that the government could respond quickly and flexibly to what may come next.