In his song ‘Texas – 1947’ Guy Clark describes waiting with his mother and some neighbours for a new train to hurtle past their west Texas way station. People sit and wait until, off in the distance, the train is heard a-comin'. Clark’s mother pulls him back, but not before he gets ‘to lay a nickel on the track’.
The song evokes wide skies and vast landscapes. We sense the Texans’ anticipation of a thing to come. Old timers have seen other trains. For the children, what is coming is beyond their imagination.
The image of a train generating such fever is charming. Even as it represented the apex of technology in Texas in 1947, the world was coming to terms with the atom bomb. Multitudes of marvels have followed. We’ve even put men on the moon. We’ve discovered how the universe works. We’ve unravelled the human genome.
Change is eternal. Yesterday is the past. Tomorrow is the future. How we look at past, present and future varies. Like Clark’s post-war Texans, we can anticipate it with excitement or foreboding. In Ireland, for better or worse, we usually foresee with mere fatalism. What will be will be.
But will it? Only some people pause to ask. Most just keep on keeping on. The truth is, with intelligence, foresight and problem solving we can change the future. The way it looks now, we’ll need to and it will be extremely unwise to presume, as we Irish so often do, that someone else will do the dirty work.
The looming energy crisis has grabbed the most headlines in recent months. Other challenges occupying our thoughts include the future construction of the Irish and the issue of global terrorism. But there’s a challenge out there that is far more immediate and potentially more lethal than all these combined.
It’s the flu or, more precisely avian flu. Last week Dr. Richard Collins, who is acknowledged as an expert in wildlife, warned that wild birds who overwinter here could bring the disease with them.
To date, we’ve thought of avian flu in terms of flocks of ducks and chickens in China and Vietnam. The virus is H5N1. It is endemic in bird flocks in Asia. But in recent years it has jumped species to infect humans. We are at the edge of a mutation that will leap from human to human and will potentially kill hundreds of millions of people.
This is not new information. In fact, experts have been signalling the need for preparation as far back as January 2004 when our readiness for such a pandemic was reviewed by international experts at a Dublin conference. Subsequently, developed countries like the UK, France and Germany placed orders for anti-viral medicines.
But we did not. Indeed, at the 2004 conference it emerged that we don't even have enough Tamiflu to treat all frontline staff in the event of a pandemic.
To be fair, the manufacturers have been working flat out to produce enough to go round. Recently a committee of officials from two Government Departments has met to review contingency plans and it’s reported that orders for a stockpile of the vaccine have been issued.
We’re late into this particular race and the laid back approach astounds many.
One suspects that Irish authorities have been lulled by their success in keeping out foot and mouth disease. Pessimists will think instead of the debacle surrounding the distribution of iodine some years ago.
In this sense, Richard Collins’ comments are timely. Those who think that closing airports, slaughtering stocks and quarantining people will do the job must think again. The avian flu virus H5N1 has been found in wild birds in Siberia. Teal, widgeon and mallards migrate here from there or stop in Ireland en route to elsewhere. Starlings too.
The point here is that the Chinese and Vietnamese were able to contain outbreaks by isolating farms. But, if the disease becomes established in wild stocks there is no way to exercise such controls.
Russian authorities report that thousands of birds have died in Siberia since mid-July. Richard Collins says that birds will start to head west from Russia at the end of September.
On August 12 The Irish Times quoted a Health Service Executive spokeswoman as saying that the World Health Organisation had issued no notification of increased risk to humans from avian flu and that there is no evidence of sustained transmission of the disease between humans. But the point is that a pandemic is overdue and this virus has been indicating that it is close to the key mutation.
The train is hooting in the distance. We know it’s coming, we just don’t know when. As Roy Keane famously put it – fail to prepare, prepare to fail.