But we are more modern, some would say. Yes, but that modern travel lets it spread faster and modern antibiotics don't work on a viral infectous disease.
The worst strain of avian flu, now identified of the five current, that is the most virulant is currently running a 75% fatality rate.
Bird virus infecting a human will mutate as soon as it hits a human already infected with human flu. Then it will spread human to human and the only question is will it mutate with the leathal characteristics.
If we were dealing with an epidemic, instead of a possible pandemic for a more fatal strain, then the current 170,000 respirators would cover the 105,000 utilized in a normal bad year, but with a pandemic, respirator supplies, vaccine development and manufacture and all the other needed tools could end up to be too-little, too-late.
Finally, the last thing my browsing in the last few months has given me to worry about is the fact that the 1918 pandemic had more than half or its fatalities in the healthy 18 to 40 age range due to how vigourously a healthy body tries to fight off a virulant influenze. The body poisons itself much like toxic shock in a reaction called Cytokine Storm.
Now, I don't like being an alarmist, but having just watched New Orleans learn that failing to allow for a Cat 4-5 is a serious lack of prudence, I think that the New England Journal of Medicine is a fairly conservative and non-alarmist source:
Should H5N1 become the next pandemic strain, the resultant morbidity and mortality could rival those of 1918, when more than half the deaths occurred among largely healthy people between 18 and 40 years of age and were caused by a virus-induced cytokine storm (see diagram) that led to the acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS).4 The ARDS-related morbidity and mortality in the pandemic of 1918 was on a different scale from those of 1957 and 1968 — a fact that highlights the importance of the virulence of the virus subtype or genotype. Clinical, epidemiologic, and laboratory evidence suggests that a pandemic caused by the current H5N1 strain would be more likely to mimic the 1918 pandemic than those that occurred more recently.5 If we translate the rate of death associated with the 1918 influenzavirus to that in the current population, there could be 1.7 million deaths in the United States and 180 million to 360 million deaths globally. We have an extremely limited armamentarium with which to handle millions of cases of ARDS — one not much different from that available to the front-line medical corps in 1918.
Thank you for the post, but don't waste your breath.
These people don't want to know, and don't care.
Although, like me, you probably sleep better at night knowing you tried to warn them.