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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices

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To: tejek who wrote (256030)	10/18/2005 7:56:10 AM
From: bentway	Read Replies (1) of 1572223

As Bird Flu Arrives at Europe's Doorstep, Officials Try to Counter Panic americanscientist.org European leaders and public health officials worldwide tread carefully as they attempt to inform the public about avian flu's recent landing on the continent's doorstep. Tests have confirmed that the virus found in poultry in both Turkey and Romania was H5N1, the deadly strain of avian flu that has circulated among birds and killed more than 60 people in parts of Asia where subsistence farmers and their poultry flocks often live in close quarters. Public information campaigns can't counter human nature's basest and most fearful instincts about preserving well-being. And there are clearly legitimate reasons to fear that the deadly H5N1 could swap genes with a flu strain that passes from person to person and become a pandemic. But Europeans need to keep bird flu in perspective, urged Dick Thompson of the World Health Organization. "People confuse it with pandemic influenza, but they're very different diseases," said Thompson. "Bird flu is a disease among animals; it's very difficult for this virus to move from poultry into humans. ... If people just paid attention to the human risk, the possibility of infection is very low." And French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin joined other political leaders in dining on fowl and suggesting to his constituents that they "must not give in to panic." At the same time, governments have to plan for the worst, which WHO influenza program head Klaus Stoehr summed up on German radio: "The virus has the potential to change and mutate, and thus spark a terrible pandemic of the kind that has occurred every once in a while over past centuries. There is no question that if such a pandemic occurs, we'll be looking at hundreds of thousands or even millions of deaths worldwide."

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