Word: flu
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...power and experience to handle the increasingly difficult internal security challenge symbolized by Monday's Gaza firefights. Still, Hamas is taking a pragmatic approach, blessing current talks about opening border crossings to ease the stranglehold on Gaza's food supplies and also on combating a regional outbreak of bird flu...
...document weighs in on genocide, avian flu, AIDS, drug cartels and other stateless threats to American safety, but it doesn't offer a new strategy on these topics, beyond reiterating what the administration has done such as the $15 billion, five-year effort to stem AIDS. As with much of life, especially in Washington, the details get worked out later...
...This is the hardest kind of risk to focus on because it?s potentially huge but nobody knows if it will happen or how big it will be," the consultant says. One possibility is that bird flu will mutate and start infecting people easily, but the result is only a mild pandemic, like the flu pandemic of 1968. (Many people who were alive then still aren?t aware they lived through a pandemic.) In that case, people will wonder what all the fuss was about. But another possibility is that the pandemic will be severe...
...Even if a severe pandemic occurs, Sandman points out, most people would probably survive. "Let?s say it kills 5% of infected people, which is twice as bad as 1918," he says. "That still means that 95% of people who get the flu have two weeks of hell and then they get better. And when they get better, long before the government makes a vaccine, they?ll be immune." We should then figure out how to gather these immunized folks, Sandman says, into volunteer groups to do the jobs?like food and water deliveries - that might be needed...
...Sandman has some advice for journalists covering the bird flu as well: stop focusing so much on birds and other animals that get infected. "The problem with people focusing on bird flu and not a pandemic among humans is that as long as there?s no bird flu in town, they think they?re safe. We really need people to understand that it?s not about the birds. You?re not at any greater risk after a bird is found to be infected and you?re not any safer before an infected bird is found." The key moment will come...