Originally Posted by Linkster

Well - I can say I have a few

Damian - not calling your qualifications into question my friend - I was a health physicist in my "former life" so Im also a little qualified and have first hand knowledge of the ineptness of the WHO and CDC

The University of Florida has a good simple history of the Avian Flu http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/PS032
I dont believe I said that the H5N1 had been around since then - I said the avian flu had been - although most strains, including this one carry a threat between the birds and their handlers, as in most avian flues - this variant is not very likely to be transmitted human to human because of the attack location receptors - in human to human transmission it needs to be something around the mouth or nose - and the H5N1 can only attach in the lungs/internal organs. The only outlyer in documented cases was in the Orient where the drinking of fowl blood is common and one death was attributed to H5N1 from that type of exposure.

The point I was trying to make is that we have influenza/flu outbreaks every year in the US with over 100,000 deaths EVERY YEAR attributed to it - and now we are worried about a virus that has been around as long as medicine has been keeping records of these virii and killed 100 people over its whole history? Something doesnt make sense.

Granted any virus can mutate - just as avian flu has many times over the years to cause possible pandemics - but with clean facilities every one of these outbreaks has been controlled.