There was a neat article in the New York Times last week about a growing fear accompanying the spring bird migrations in the Republic of Georgia.

In the early morning hours, the cobblestone alleys that wander this city's slopes are normally crowded with schoolchildren, walking in groups with their backpacks and books. But such sights have lately become rare.

According to the article, school attendance has dipped to half of its normal levels. It’s an interesting way of looking at the avian flu virus, and the way natural processes like a March thaw and the migration of birds can take on a doomsday aspect when everybody's waiting for the big leap of an animal-to-human pandemic.

But there was a little bit of good news about the H5 virus last week as well. According to this article, two different groups of researchers, one in Japan and one in Holland, have determined why the virus won’t easily transmit between humans. The researchers found that the cells most receptive to this particular virus live deep within our deepest branches of respiratory tracts. Viruses that turn into human flu pandemics infect cells in the upper respiratory system, where they get spread around by coughing and sneezing. So we’re pretty safe for now, until the flu undergoes the genetic mutations it needs to get us where it counts—in the upper airways.

And finally, an article in yesterday’s Times by Donald G. McNeil, Jr. gave a little breakdown of our last few disease panics, and how we managed to stop worrying about them. Surely you remember our old friends mad cow, small pox, and SARS? Noting that a March 13 report of a cow in Alabama having spongiform encephalopathy drew little notice from newspapers and (consequently?) the general public, McNeil concluded that the people have finally accepted the disease as a “very, very remote threat.”

One of McNeil’s more interesting points is the relation between trust in the government and public health panics. “Fear waxed or waned according to whether the public thought government was being honest,” he writes. With mad cow, the government was thought to play to down the threat in order to protect the beef industry, since the secretary of agriculture was a former food lobbyist and her chief spokeswoman had worked for the National Cattleman’s Beef Association; with smallpox, the government was thought to be spreading fear of biological weapons to drum up support for the war; with SARS, “it was not the American government, but the Chinese one, whose motives were questioned. It was concealing cases and refusing entry to international disease detectives.”

So where does this leave us now, on the trust-in-government scale? Perhaps in an effort to calm the panic growing in our hearts while we contemplate that one, McNeil leaves us with these comforting words from John M. Barry, author of "The Great Influenza," a history of the 1918 pandemic:

"What people are afraid of is the unknown," he said. "Not eating meat because you're worried about mad cow is like not going in the water because you saw 'Jaws.' But once the threat arrives, even if there's an undercurrent of terror in the whole society, people see the consequences and they get accustomed to it, just as they got accustomed to plague in the Middle Ages."

Ah, just like the plague in the Middle Ages.