Avian Influenza: Catastrophe Waiting in the Wings?

It's still primarily a bird disease, known to have killed only 32 humans since January. But H5N1, the avian influenza strain that swept across eastern Asia in 2004, killing millions of poultry, has cast a darker cloud over human health than numbers alone can explain. Experts fear that the virus could spawn a new influenza pandemic—a public health disaster of potentially devastating proportions. As Asian farmers saw their livelihoods destroyed this year, scientists made one worrisome discovery after another about the virus, and public health authorities around the globe began to take the risk seriously—only to discover that, should a pandemic erupt tomorrow, the world would be pathetically ill prepared.