The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu Review

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(More customer reviews)Another great 'Doom, Doom, the End is Near' book. It may even be true.
But somehow after the prospect of nuclear war, then nuclear winter, Hong Kong flu, then Global Warming, AIDS, Ebola and so on you get just a bit jaded.
First the bad news. Avian Flu is a killer. The 1918 flu pandemic killed about 2.5% of the people it infected. This new one seems to kill about 50% (this book says two out of every three) of the people that get infected. It is rapidly spreading. This week there were cases reported in Turkey, right on the threshold of Europe (Birds do fly around a lot).
Second, the good news. In order for the virus to really be deadly to large numbers of people it has to mutate to make it capable of being transmitted from human to human instead of just bird to human as it is now. When it mutates it isn't as likely to be as deadly as it is now. A virus only has so much ability to carry things around. If it develops a 'skin' tough enough to travel by air, it will likely lose some of its deadlyness. Why? Because of all the flu's around this is about the worst. When it mutates, the skin is going to take more virus stuff, and some of that comes from the deadly stuff. Ebola has a higher mortality than Avian flu, the virus can't live outside of body fluids. Still at 50% mortality for Avian Flu, even if it goes to 5%, that's still worse than the 1918 variety. Another good point is that all of the governments around the world from Viet Nam to the UN are concentrating on the problem It's going to be tracked very carefully. As soon as an airborne variety mutates, a vaccine will be developed on an emergency basis.
Is there a risk -- absolutely. It it an emergency -- not yet. Is the book worth reading, absolutely, even if for no other reason than to see how our Government operates when faced with problems like this.

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From the acclaimed writer The Nation calls the "master of disaster prose," a terrifying forecast of a new global threat."We are talking at least seven million deaths, but maybe more-10 million, 20 million, and the worst case, 100 million."-Shigeru Omi, Regional Director, western pacific office of the World Health Organization, November 2004Avian influenza is a viral asteroid on a collision course with humanity. In 1918, a pandemic strain of influenza killed at least 40 million people in three months. Now, leading researchers believe, another world catastrophe is imminent.A virus of astonishing lethality, known as H5N1, has become entrenched in the poultry and wild bird populations of East Asia. It kills two out of every three people it infects. The World Health Organization warns that it is on the verge of mutating into a super-contagious pandemic form that could visit several billion homes within two years.In this urgent and extraordinarily frightening book, Mike Davis reconstructs the scientific and political history of a viral apocalypse in the making, exposing the central roles of agribusiness and the fast-food industries, abetted by corrupt governments, in creating the ecological conditions for the emergence of this new plague. He also details the scandalous failure of the Bush administration, obsessed with hypothetical "bio-terrorism," to safeguard Americans from the greatest biological threat since HIV/AIDS.

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