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Originally Posted by Dirty Dane
They found bird flu just few kilometers from where I live, and I could not care less.
This has been going on for decades and the only reason we are aware of it now is because dead animals have been tested. Weak people and animals die of flu, nothing new in that.
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This is not about "the flu", since there is actually no such single thing - genetic mutations cause the emergence of ever new strains, with each kind being different in its effects, potential for transmission, etc.
A danger of the bird flu, or more specifically, the H5N1 strain, is that because it is a kind relatively "new" to humans, we have very little defences against it. Each time a mammal is infected, there is a small chance that the virus may mutate or reassort with other "common" flu viruses in a way which causes the possibility of easy human to human transmission. If that happens, it may cause a huge death toll.
Your assertion that the flu kills "weak people and animals" is incorrect in this context. While that goes for common human strains of the flu, the Spanish Flu of 1918 was most deadly for healthy, young people. People aged 15-35. And guess what? It is now believed that the Spanish Flu originated from birds, while current research into the bird flu we see now suggests that it is evolving along a similar path as the Spanish Flu.
Now, what damage would a pandemic do? Let's look at the Spanish Flu: it infected a fifth to a third of world population, and killed 1-5% of total world population, or, more specifically, somewhere between 20 million and 100 million people worldwide. Perhaps more people than died in WWII.
World population has more than tripled since then, and the bird flu has much higher mortality rates for those infected than the Spanish Flu had. In a worst case scenario, a strain capable of rapid human to human transmissions could kill hundreds of millions of people worldwide, the equivalent of a large scale nuclear war.
While it is not at all unlikely that none of this ever comes to pass, it is a very real and very large danger. Even if chances of it happening were very slim, it would still be something worth taking seriously.