We were lucky with AIDS. If people afflicted with AIDS could have transmitted the disease like the common cold there would have been a world crisis and millions and millions of deaths.
Are we going to be so lucky with bird flu? We're finding already it is not just restricted in the first instance to chickens - eg. ducks can get it and transmit it to humans.
It has not been wiped out. People are still getting the disease but there is an amazing degree of complacency. The virus has every chance of mutating once it affects a person so that it can be transmitted from person to person like the common cold. That is the very nature of viruses.
Unless there is an urgent cooordinated world effort now, there is a very realistic chance that bird flu will cause a pandemic like the flu pandemic of 1919. It was made a crime then to even cough in public.
Millions and millions of innocent people around the world will be killed unless the threat of human to human transmission of the virus is treated as seriously as the war on terrorism.
What are you doing? Are you contacting the Australian and US governments to take this threat seriously?
