Something To Fret Over

Drop your Senate popcorn. While we were so busy thinking about the 'crisis' in the US, mother nature has not been idle.

It seems that things aren't looking too good for mankind's short-term survival right now:

A leading scientist warned yesterday that the avian flu virus is on the point of mutating into a pandemic disease and says that current estimates that such a pandemic could cause 7.5m deaths may understate the threat. His warnings come as experts writing in today's edition of Nature voice concerns about the world's inability to manufacture sufficient vaccines for a pandemic and warn of the impact that the virus - H5N1 - could have on the global economy.

In an accompanying editorial Nature argues that so far such warnings have "fallen on deaf ears". It backs a call by Prof Osterhaus and his colleagues at the Erasmus Medical Centre, in Rotterdam - one of the world's leading virus research labs - for a global taskforce to strengthen agencies on the ground.
There have been 90 human infections in south-east Asia , from which 54 people have died. But while culling and the vaccination of poultry appears to have slowed outbreaks in Thailand and other parts of south-east Asia, this year Vietnam has seen a worrying number of human infections in the same family groups. According to Prof Osterhaus such clustering could mean the virus is becoming more efficient at infecting humans - a precondition for a pandemic

If you rtfa, then you'll learn that they're projecting that 20% of the world's population could become infected. Yikes. This would make SARS look like a sore throat. And where is the world's greatest democracy on all this? Oh, right, they're busy ensuring that certain judges get seated and that the UN is 'reformed'. No time available on the calendar right now for dealing with world pandemics.

On the bright side, I may as well get that Mac mini now, as it doesn't look like there'll be much more of a future to save for.