by Calculated Risk on 3/28/2006 01:48:00 AM

The NYTimes Science Section has a series of articles on the Avian Flu today.

On the Front: A Pandemic Is Worrisome but 'Unlikely'

Having observed A(H5N1) for many years in Asia, he thinks it is unlikely that the virus is poised to jump species, becoming readily transmissible to humans or among them. Nor does he believe the mantra that a horrific influenza pandemic is inevitable or long overdue. He points out that the only prior pandemic with a devastating death toll was in 1918, and he says that may have been "a unique biological event."

"For years, they have been telling us it's going to happen — and it hasn't," said Dr. Farrar, director of the Oxford University Clinical Research Unit at the hospital in Vietnam. "Billions of chickens in Asia have been infected and millions of people lived with them — we in Asia are intimate with our poultry — and less than 200 people have gotten infected.

"That tells you that the constraints on the virus are considerable," he continued. "It must be hard for this virus to jump."

At the U.N.: This Virus Has an Expert 'Quite Scared'

...Dr. Nabarro describes himself as "quite scared," especially since the disease has broken out of Asia and reached birds in Africa, Europe and India much faster than he expected it to.

"That rampant, explosive spread," he said, "and the dramatic way it's killing poultry so rapidly suggests that we've got a very beastly virus in our midst."
...
But he repeatedly said that he is more scared than he was when he took the job in September. In October, he predicted that the virus would reach Africa, where surveillance is so poor that deaths of chickens or humans could easily go undiagnosed for weeks. Last month, he was proved right.

The infection of millions more birds in many more countries "has led to an exponential increase of the load of virus in the world," he said. And influenza is a fast-mutating virus. Each infected bird and person is actually awash in minutely different strains, and it takes lengthy genetic testing to sequence each one — so if a pandemic strain were to appear, "it might be quite difficult for us to pick up that change when it happens."

From the Chickens' Perspective, the Sky Really Is Falling

"If you're a chicken," Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said at a recent conference on avian flu, "this is a pandemic."
...
By some estimates, more than 200 million domestic chickens, ducks and geese have already either died of the disease or been killed on the order of public health authorities to prevent its spread.

At least there is some good news; I'm not a chicken.