The Bird Flu

[AJ]

So how serious is this in terms of coming over to the US and killing Millions like some are saying it could.

I've seen some basic coverage on CNN.com but was wondering what others thought or have found on it.

[Enes]

The bird flu has ben around last few years... nothing new...

[AJ]

Really? Then why all the coverage now? I've just never heard about it and in one article Bush said his new plan had a worst case scenario of a few million dead in thr states alone.

[Enes]

Because it wasn't impacting US before, it was only affecting asia/easter Europe ... Now when there is a chance of it spreading to US thats when all the hype is being created.

Afterall TV stations need something else to yell about, they pretty much exhausted all things to scream about so far and now are jumping all over this.

Not to say that they shouldn't, but just saying that they should have jumped and yelled about it long time ago when people in asia were dying.... which we didn't hear anything about until now.

-E

[niterydr]

Very good point Enes.

[Enes]

http://www.yementimes.com/article.shtml?i=887&p=front&a=3

one of the articles pointing back to 1997 !!!



Another link that has a lot more links on the site and you can learn more about th flue
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4949542&sourceCode=gaw



and somewhat of a timeline explaining the path this flue has taken

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4959310

-E

[CVD]

So this has been around for a while and killed fewer than 100 people world wide?

Wtf makes this newsworthy?

edit*
And I do remember seeing news coverage of this for the last two years, so its not like it has been ignored.

[Enes]

The key reason why is because it resembles the 1918 epidemic....


-E

[93sc]

A couple of things have brought it out in the US press more. One is that there are cases of humans who have contracted bird flu over in asia (if I remember right, I wasn't paying that much attention to the newscast when I heard it) a few months ago. And the other might be the pres is trying to look like he's doing something in order to bolster his numbers a bit.

[Kracka]

IMO, the media is just hyping this up to get more attention since people are losing interest (if you will) in the war-effort. I'm not worried about it one bit.