To worry? Yes, it's unreasonable, because there's not a thing the WHO can do about it. "Worrying", in particular, does nothing. For that matter, pretty much anything involving a PR spokesperson from the WHO does nothing.
But that goes 10x for hyperbolic articles from the Guardian, which are the real problem here. They take the inanities from the PR person, and twist them into hysterical headlines that panic people for clicks. You'll note the use of the classic "X happens after Y" pattern, which is a standard yellow-journalism trope to link X and Y implicitly, even if they're unrelated ("puppies die after politician speaks!")
In this case, the WHO spokesman said that the 'increasing reports of bird flu in humans are "worrying"' (which is itself an anti-pattern of quoting a single word), but the rest of the article doesn't at support the headline. If anything, it goes out of its way to say that this particular case is not worrying, literally in the first paragraph:
> The discovery of two cases of bird flu within the same family in Cambodia has highlighted the concern over potential human-to-human spread of the virus, although experts have stressed the risk remains low.
No, they weren't. They spread widely, and then simply petered off for reasons we don't fully understand.
To conclude that we therefore "contained" these viruses via some bureaucratic measure is a classic example of human hubris with regards to our power over nature.
That's totally false. Infection control systems were activated. SARS and MERS did not spread widely, either. Here's one example from Canada:
>All hospitals in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) and Simcoe County were ordered to activate their “Code Orange” emergency plans by the government. “Code Orange” meant that the involved hospitals suspended nonessential services. They were also required to limit visitors, create isolation units for potential SARS patients, and implement protective clothing for exposed staff (i.e., gowns, masks, and goggles). Four days later, provincial officials extended access restrictions to all Ontario hospitals.
Contact tracing is standard even for outbreaks of diseases as common as measles. Page 6 of this Alberta health document for measles control from 2018 discusses how to respond, including contact tracing.
No one said otherwise. You're leaping to the conclusion that these "control systems" caused the viruses to go away.
> SARS and MERS did not spread widely, either.
SARS: 8096 known cases across 29 different countries. [1]
MERS: 2603 known cases across 27 different countries. We're still seeing cases, btw. [2]
I guess we have different definitions of "spread widely". (Also "contained", in the case of MERS.) As I said, the viruses petered out after rapidly spreading around the world. We still don't understand why, but it's arrogance to conclude that it was something humans did that "contained" them (particularly when at least one of them wasn't stopped).
> Contact tracing is standard even for outbreaks of diseases as common as measles.
...and it doesn't work well for respiratory viruses, as we just learned from watching the world try to do it for years, only to fail completely.
Of all the debunked interventions we witnessed over the last 3 years, "contact tracing respiratory illnesses" is uniquely amongst the most costly and damaging blunders in human history. Yes, "public health" may engage in this kind of pseudo-scientific, bureaucratic theater, but it certainly doesn't mean that it's effective.
Bringing this to the current day, the bird flu is now endemic amongst wild birds (and possibly other animals) around the planet -- that is how it is getting into chicken farms despite all of our current efforts. The horse (or the chicken, in this case) is literally out of the barn. If bird-to-human or human-to-human transmission were common, we'd know it by now. Moreover, if that were true, there's literally zero chance that we could somehow "contain" a virus endemic in the animal population. It's going to do what it's going to do.
I lived in a place that did contact tracing for SARS-Cov-2 and it definitely worked. Other places in Canada had large outbreaks they had to quell with extensive lockdowns to prevent hospital overwhelm.
Nova Scotia did extensive contact tracing when a case first appeared and often could get rid of small outbreaks without additional measures (beyond border controls.)
The spread of SARS and MERS around the world was via airplanes. That doesn’t mean they for firmly established in any population.
In literally every part of the world, SARS-CoV2 is endemic. It didn't "work", you're just making a post hoc attribution of wiggles in the first derivative of case counts to an action that you prefer.
A far more parsimonious reason that (for example) Novia Scotia had fewer cases (for a time) is that Novia Scotia is in the middle of nowhere and has less than a million people. It's the inverse of the reason that the major cities of the world got it first.
But that goes 10x for hyperbolic articles from the Guardian, which are the real problem here. They take the inanities from the PR person, and twist them into hysterical headlines that panic people for clicks. You'll note the use of the classic "X happens after Y" pattern, which is a standard yellow-journalism trope to link X and Y implicitly, even if they're unrelated ("puppies die after politician speaks!")
In this case, the WHO spokesman said that the 'increasing reports of bird flu in humans are "worrying"' (which is itself an anti-pattern of quoting a single word), but the rest of the article doesn't at support the headline. If anything, it goes out of its way to say that this particular case is not worrying, literally in the first paragraph:
> The discovery of two cases of bird flu within the same family in Cambodia has highlighted the concern over potential human-to-human spread of the virus, although experts have stressed the risk remains low.