Facts and frenzy on bird flu

Chicago Tribune: Bird flu has spread beyond Southeast Asia to China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Romania, Turkey and, possibly, Greece. It's still bird flu though, not people flu. The world has time to prepare for the prospect that the H5N1 virus will become a widespread lethal threat to humans.
Each new bird population that becomes infected increases the risk of human exposure. That in turn increases the risk the virus will mutate to a form that would be easily passed from person to person in a world population with no natural immunity to the strain.
To understand why bird flu has so rattled the scientific community in 2005, you have to understand the scope of the global pandemic of 1918. That began as a strain of bird flu and killed an estimated 675,000 Americans and 50 million people worldwide. So far, H5N1 has killed 60 or so people. Most of them lived or worked in close proximity to infected birds in Southeast Asia. What's most ominous is that represents a 55 percent fatality rate of those people who have been infected. By contrast, less than 1 percent of the tens of millions of people infected with ordinary flu each year die from it.
This threat of a deadly global pandemic is real and growing. Experts insist it is only a matter of time before the virus makes the jump to a form that puts more people at risk.
International cooperation
That's no reason to hide under the covers. But nations must cooperate in ways they haven't before. A virus will not respect national borders.
There will be no H5N1 vaccine available for at least the first six months of an outbreak because it would take that long to identify the virus strain and cultivate the vaccine. And beyond that, there is limited worldwide capacity for vaccine production.
The United States and other nations are trying to ramp up their production capacity. But that is easier said than done, as the United States discovered during last year's flu vaccine shortfall. Dozens of companies have abandoned flu vaccine production in recent years because it's a difficult business with low profit margins and high legal liability. Providing incentives for these companies to re-enter this business is part of a solution.
The window to squelch a worldwide pandemic likely will be mere weeks once the virus can be easily passed among people. The most effective step the world could take is to establish a comprehensive global surveillance system capable of swiftly detecting and reacting to a human outbreak.