Spreading Fear Like a Virus

THE MONSTER AT OUR DOOR

The Global Threat of Avian Flu

By Mike Davis

New Press. 212 pp. $21.95

FALSE ALARM

The Truth About the Epidemic of Fear

By Marc Siegel

Wiley. 246 pp. $24.95

Four years ago, an administration on high alert after 9/11 responded to anthrax attacks in Washington and New York by mobilizing scientists for a War on Bioterror. As we now know, Iraq, the one nation we most feared might use such weapons, didn't have them. Meanwhile, investigators' best leads in the still-unsolved crime point to someone who had access to our government's stockpiles of the deadly pathogen.

Last month, the Bush administration enlisted fighters of infectious diseases in another war -- this time against the threat of an avian flu pandemic. Are the billions of dollars recently pledged for flu drugs and vaccines a long overdue response to an imminent peril? Or will this turn out to be the latest in a long line of bugs du jour, destined to briefly threaten our sang-froid (and drain the Treasury) before fading like anthrax, smallpox, Ebola and SARS?

Mike Davis, an author better known for his dissection of the diseases of Southern California urbanism, spent a year immersed in the science of Southeast Asia's avian flu outbreak and came away convinced that "a flu pandemic is not a fate we can avoid." In "The Monster at Our Door," he argues that it is only a matter of time before the H5N1 flu virus or some other deadly variant hatched in the sprawling city-slums of Asia mutates into a grim reaper capable of culling the human herd by tens of millions.

Davis's claim for inevitability hinges on the nature of the rapidly mutating influenza virus, which incubates in birds and migrates to animals and humans wherever they live in close proximity (that's why most flu strains start in South China and Southeast Asia). This chameleon-like virus usually sends a fairly benign illness coursing through humanity. Benignity, however, is in the eye of the beholder, since flu carries off 30,000 to 50,000 Americans every year, mostly among the very young or very old.