Fear of virus is sickest thing about bird flu, By Marc Siegel (MARC SIEGEL, an associate professor at the New York University School of Medicine, is the author of ``Bird Flu: Everything You Need to Know About the Next Pandemic.'' He wrote this article for the Washington Post.)

Fear is a deeply rooted emotion -- one that can serve as a lifesaving response to imminent danger. But because we humans often magnify risk, fear can also cause us to overreact to remote threats, such as bird flu.

According to a significant study published in the prestigious British journal Nature recently, the H5N1 bird flu virus is at least two large mutations and two small mutations away from being the next human pandemic virus. This virus attaches deep in the lungs of birds but cannot adhere to the upper respiratory tract of humans. Since we can't transmit the virus to one another, it poses little immediate threat to us.

So why did the ``flu hunter,'' world-renowned Tennessee virologist Robert Webster, say of bird flu on ABC that there are ``about even odds at this time for the virus to learn how to transmit human to human,'' and that ``society just can't accept the idea that 50 percent of the population could die . . . I'm sorry if I'm making people a little frightened, but I feel it's my role.''

I'm sorry, Dr. Webster, but your role is to track influenza in the test tube, not to enter into broad speculation on national television. By your way of thinking, we should all be either building an escape rocket ship or killing every bird we see before it can kill us.

Fear causes the public to blur the distinction between birds and people, and so, as the H5N1 virus infects flocks of birds in Pakistan and Israel, nightly news watchers track the path to the United States. The poultry industry cringes as migratory birds that may be carrying H5N1 make their way closer to the northern shores of North America.