Reply #107: Several points of concern, from a pbs interview with an expert:

[IDemo]

Points below are taken from a PBS interview with Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Lethalness: "The other important point is that this is a very highly lethal virus; it's killed 53 out of the 97 (55 percent) documented cases. It's unlike what we see in the regular flu, which is less than 1 percent."

Adaptability: -- "this virus has adapted itself to jump from chickens to humans in Asia."

No immunity: --"this is a virus, the H5-N1, which the human society has had no prior experience with. So there's no residual or baseline immunity." And, - "you don't have antibodies to it; I don't have antibodies to it."

Easily spread: --"it's important to understand, when we talk about contagious viruses -- and I know lots of people have heard of the so-called scary ones like Ebola and Marburg -- these are actually really hard to get compared to flu. This influenza virus can sit on a doorknob for six days and still be infectious to somebody who comes along six days later."

An inevitable epidemic: --"this isn't something that's going to just disappear. This is here to stay. We will have a pandemic sometime. It may be this year, next year, the year later."

Not enough vaccine: "The problem is that the vaccine-manufacturing capacity of the world is only anywhere between 300 million and 450 million. There are six billion people in the world."

Immune deficiency: "And worse yet, in 1918, we did not have hundreds of millions of people with immune deficiency in the world -- immune deficiency either because they were elderly, cancer patients, or probably most significant because they had HIV.."