First off…  any spambots reading this should immediately go here, here, here,  and here.  Die spambots, die!  And now…  the winning entries in the Watcher’s Council vote for this week are Witches’ Brew at the UN by Gates o…

I notice someone mentioned NPR as a reliable source. Ever since I was cured of them after their gazillionth “the sky is falling” they’re the last ones I’d pay attention to.

You, on the other hand, being of sound mind, I DO trust. I wish I didn’t. I am morphing into a survivalist.

My paternal grandmother died in the last global flu epidemic and it smashed my family for generations. I’m preparing for this one.

An avian flu pandemic would be a catastrophe that would unabashedly dwarf the human loss and disruption from all of this year’s international hurricanes and cyclones combined. Now with the oh-so-trustworthy headlines being snagged (again) by Roberts an…

First off…  any spambots reading this should immediately go here, here, here,  and here.  Die spambots, die!  And now…  here are all the links submitted by members of the Watcher’s Council for this week’s vote. Council li…

Laurie Garrett, whom you might recall as NPR’s eloquent science reporter for a decade, wrote an excellent book a few years back, “The Coming Plague.” Reading even just a few chapters of that book will give you a pretty good sense of the real problems involved in identifying and preparing for new infectious diseases, and the political and social hurdles in implementing policies and medical programs.

More recently she has written an excellent comprehensive article for Foreign Affairs, the online e-magazine published by the Council on Foreign Relations.

It’s lengthy — some 5,000 words, or about 13 pages — but you can’t read it and walk away wondering whether it’s worth preparing against the threat posed by Avian Flu and its sibling strains. In the first paragraph, she points out that Avian flu has killed about 50 percent of documented patients infected since 1997. A few paragraphs later she points out that examination of U.S. records from the “Spanish Influenza Pandemic” of 1917 to 1918 indicate a mortality rate of about ONE PERCENT of all persons infected. Ironically, where we have become accustomed to warnings that young children and the elderly are thought to be most vulnerable to flu outbreaks of the last few decades, the Spanish flu was most savagely fatal among young adults, possibly because the older populace had gained partial immunity from several nationwide flu outbreaks some decades earlier.