Proximity to a disease certainly stimulates awareness and preparedness to deal with it, not to mention alarm about its possible consequences. The deadly H5N1 strain of avian influenza has been confirmed in a mute swan in Scotland and is now being investigated among a number of wild birds in Antrim and Down.
The disease has become pandemic among birds in a number of countries and has killed nearly 100 people worldwide through direct contact with them. But it has not yet made the viral mutation that would allow it to be passed from human to human. There is no human immunity against the H5 antigen, which means that a lethal pandemic would follow if that occurs.
The threat has thus reached our region, even if its presence on this island has yet to be confirmed. This completes its journey over the last three years from south-east Asia to the western Atlantic, brought by wild birds. Already a wide arc stretching from the Urals to Nigeria is affected, criss-crossed by many avian flight paths - some of which come through Ireland at different times of the year. Fourteen member-states of the European Union are now affected.
Awareness of how the disease travels, and of the potential dangers involved, comes with a realisation that preparedness is vital in dealing with it. There has been intensive consultation at national and EU levels about this. Much experience has been accumulated in Ireland during previous outbreaks of animal disease, such as the foot-and-mouth scare several years ago. The methods used are drastic and immediate, but can be limited if action such as culling and public education is taken pre-emptively and in well-targeted fashion. This has been the case in Vietnam, for example, over the last year, where the authorities have acted with exemplary effectiveness. Reports of growing outbreaks among birds in Nigeria, where the political and administrative infrastructure is far weaker than in Vietnam, but where people and birds live in as close proximity, are frightening. In Ireland there has been good preparation on an all-island basis.
The great fear is that the avian disease could mutate to humans. The longer it affects birds the more likely that is, according to experts. Most of them believe it is a question of when, not whether, this will occur. It will not be possible to produce an effective vaccine after this happens, even though similar preventive drugs can be stockpiled before that. But plans to develop one in sufficient quantities for mass innoculation would run into huge operational problems and it would be necessary to make awful decisions about who should get them first, how they would be distributed, who should be quarantined and where.
Given the existing problems facing the health services here it is difficult to see how this could be handled optimally. Tens of thousands of people could die in Ireland during such an outbreak. That possibility must stimulate all concerned to prepare for the worst.