Thoughts of mortality while scanning the menu

I was at a Chinese restaurant the other night about to bite into a chicken foo something and stopped just in the nick of time. The chopsticks were halfway to my open mouth when I realized that the chicken was my enemy.

I have fallen victim to the bombardment of warnings of the avian flu, which began in a bag of dead chickens in Hong Kong eight years ago and is now threatening to kill everyone in the world. Almost.

Hardly a day goes by that someone isn’t warning us that a billion people could die if Type H5N1 influenza spreads out of Asia and into all the continents of the world, including us God-fearing people in the good old USA. One can clearly see that the animals of the world are rising up against us by dying of diseases that we might catch.

There was the swine flu, for instance, which began at Fort Dix in 1976, when an Army recruit told his drill instructor that he felt weak but kept on marching and later died.

I remember it very clearly because I was in a French restaurant at the time, about to take a bite of cochon de lait, which is pork, the fork being halfway to my open mouth when I suddenly remembered our president’s alert of a pending epidemic.

At it turned out, the soldier was the only one who actually died of swine flu, although, it is said, hundreds of Americans died or were seriously injured by inoculations the government gave them to ward off the flu.

When one applies government response in that case to the hurricane disasters on the Gulf Coast, perhaps the lack of its immediate intervention wasn’t a bad thing at that. The government might have just made the whole situation worse by blowing up something or purifying something or inoculating with something that could have killed thousands more.

Then there was mad cow disease. We were in London when it broke out in 1986. We were in a steakhouse near Piccadilly Circus when my wife mentioned in passing that the cattle in the U.K. were suffering from something called mad cow disease. I thought it was a joke at first and made funny faces and sounds depicting a crazy cow and finished up my bone-in sirloin between imitations.

When I learned that bovine spongiform encephalopathy was real and deadly and that humans could contract a form of it, I didn’t eat beef for weeks while everyone killed their cows. Then someone said it could be related to a disease in sheep called scrapie, which, although I thought it a pert, fun name, caused me to give up mutton stew, a British favorite.

I would like to mention here that I do not spend my life in restaurants. It’s just that I become conscious of diseases among our food sources while dining out. I feel reasonably certain that my wife wouldn’t cook anything that might turn my brain to mush and rot away my insides, but I’m not all that sure about restaurants.

And now it’s the deadly chicken. Once again we are counting on science and the government to save us as it did back in 1976, which ought to give everyone chills, if not fever, just thinking about it. Combined with today’s greedy pharmaceutical industry that will shove anything on the market that will make money, I’m not sure I want anyone poking a needle in me with a serum that might be worse than the disease.

And yet, I am not unaware of the seriousness of a malady that could potentially, as one writer suggested, “kill a billion people worldwide and make ghost towns out of parts of major cities.” Particularly vulnerable to the H5N1 virus are the old and the weak, into which dual categories I find myself. While I don’t feel particularly old, sitting and writing and doing little else for most of my life has found me with strong fingers and a solid behind, but an otherwise weak everything else.

I have survived heart surgery, the repair of double aneurysms and blood poisoning, all of which could have easily killed me, and now I am in danger of being done in by avian flu. How embarrassing would that be? “Columnist killed by Chicken Little. Film at 11.”

It seems to me that just yesterday we were worried about SARS, and before that the flesh-eating disease, and before them the Asian flu and the Hong Kong flu, not to mention the 1918 Spanish flu, which almost did kill everyone, but that was before good vaccines or, er, government assistance.

My doctor, I mean my health professional, hasn’t even received his allotment of serum to inoculate against the regular flu that wipes out a portion of us every year, not to mention a more esoteric drug that would keep the world’s chickens from killing us.

If I took seriously the idea that animals were out to do us in and even cannibalism was suspect, I would have to start thinking about vegetarianism, although the soil is polluted and everything in it subject to acid rain. So I think I’ll just go back to eating everything and take the comforting words of a medical statistician who, thinking of all that we could fall victim to, shrugged and said, “Well, 1 out of 1 of us is going to die someday anyhow.”

You can’t argue with that.

Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He’s at [email protected].