As birds migrate, the flu pandemic approaches Australian shores.

A subscriber writes:

My
work means I have to deal with some areas of this lovely country’s
health department. Word is that the government is worried that the
avian bird-flu will combine with the regular version of the common cold
leading to “a flu pandemic.” That’s why you may or may not have noticed
the push for this year’s flu vaccine…

Another subscriber writes:
We are going to need more than dust masks. Check out this article by Mike Davis who has written two great books on urban sprawl, City of Glass and Ecology of Fear. This latest is not published until October.

When
strung together, Davis’s facts paint a grim picture of destruction
that’s winging its way to Australia, with many stopovers on the way.

“Over the next ten weeks, 100,000 more geese, gulls, and
cormorants will leave their summer home at Lake Qinghai in western
China, headed for India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, and, eventually,
Australia,” writes Davis.

“An unknown number of these beautiful
migrating birds will carry H5N1, the avian flu subtype that has killed
61 people in Southeast Asia and which the World Health Organization
(WHO) fears is on the verge of mutating into a pandemic form like that
which killed 50 to 100 million people in the fall of 1918.”

Avian
influenza is endemic and “probably ineradicable among poultry in
Southeast Asia, and now seems to be spreading at pandemic velocity
amongst migratory birds, with the potential to reach most of the earth
in the next year.

“Each new outpost of H5N1 – whether among
ducks in Siberia, pigs in Indonesia, or humans in Vietnam – is a
further opportunity for the rapidly evolving virus to acquire the gene
or even simply the protein mutation that it needs to become a
mass-killer of humans.”

According to the new US Health and Human
Services Secretary Mike Leavitt, an influenza pandemic is an “absolute
certainty.” That echoes repeated warnings from the WHO that it was
“inevitable,” says Davis. “Likewise Science magazine observed that expert opinion held the odds of a global outbreak as ‘100 percent.'”

“In
the same grim spirit, the British press revealed that officials were
scouring the country for suitable sites for mass mortuaries, based on
official fears that avian flu could kill as many as 700,000 Britons.”

And Care Australia says:
CEO Robert Glasser was moved to send out a press release
on Monday warning that there is a dire need to establish an
international stockpile of anti-virals. He says “neither the stockpile
nor the planning and infrastructure needed to detect an outbreak in
developing countries and, to respond quickly, currently exist. If bird
flu acquires efficient human-to-human transmission – which it may be
about to do – he reckons it “could kill more than 100 million people
globally with up to half the global population falling ill within a
matter of weeks.”

It all makes the Australian government’s purchase of dust masks look like pretty paltry preparation.