Bird flu comes to the UK

It was always just a matter of time. I feel guilty. A former vegetarian, who even attempted to be vegan for three years, I have been making free-range poultry a big part of my diet in recent years. (The loud chattering of the budgies and cockatiels in the background doesn't help either. Yeah, I hear you, guys.) Bird flu has hit, hard, striking a turkey farm in Suffolk.

Flu's deadly numbers game

I don't pretend to understand viruses, but I fear them. Here's an edited quote:
'The big concern now is fast-track mutation: that a person carrying a human flu virus also catches avian flu. If that happens, the viruses can trade genes leading, in the worst case, to a lethal and highly infectious virus, which no one has immunity to. . . Mixing avian and human flu viruses - a process called "antigenic shift" - to produce a particularly nasty version can happen without both viruses getting into humans. Pigs can catch flu from humans and birds, making them effective mixing pots. . . One difficulty is understanding what genetic changes could make avian flu virus a global killer. The virus could need genes to make it replicate more rapidly, so you cough or sneeze more virus out. It could need genes that make you sneeze harder or more often. "It's really the $1bn question," says Jacqueline Katz of the US Centres for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta. "We really don't understand what would make it transmissible between humans." '

Today is World AIDS Day

In the Guardian, Lillian Daka writes of the "Generation of hope", the five-to-15 age group in sub-Saharan Africa. "They have the lowest HIV rates of the entire population, and they can turn the Aids pandemic around."
A heart-wrenching quote: "In an ideal world children shouldn't have to know about sex until they're preparing to join the world of adults. They should be able to learn about it as a physical expression of love and commitment rather than as a potential death sentence. But too many of the blissfully ignorant generation who grew up in the 70s and 80s have paid for their innocence with their lives. The naivety of childhood is a luxury the west can afford, but we have to get pragmatic."
I am not sure the west can afford such luxuries much longer, though.

Worse than I expected

I keep thinking that things cannot get any worse. But they can. Before the war started, I was full of dire predictions. The mildest of which was "I think they are underestimating how long and how many lives it can take." And "I don't think anyone has said how all this is going to be paid for." (I did see a report about the ordering of body bags in early March. I don't remember the figure but it was a lot higher than any number you want to think about in this context.) The worst of my predictions are based on the appalling similarities in the run-up to this war and the run-up to World War I. (I am not the only person to have noticed this. I mean to say pundits wrote about that, too.) And it is also a lot like how "we" got into Vietnam, but a lot faster and maybe even stupider, given the really advanced technology and the greater military experience the US has now compared to the mid-1960s.

And yet, the main thing that I fear is the distraction of it, the fact that, as bad as the war is, it is only one little part of the world picture, but it is dominating 95% of the news in all media. Meanwhile, in Korea, meanwhile on the West Bank, meanwhile in Kashmir, meanwhile in the Ivory Coast, etc. etc. Then there is the eerie correspondence between the outbreak of SARS now and the influenza that grew in strength in the background through the last few years of WWI, only to explode into a pandemic (Europe 1918-1919, East Cost of US 1919, midwest 1920).

But I never really anticipated the naked imperialism being displayed by elements of the American government. No, I never saw that coming. I always think that I am so paranoid about people like Rumsfeld and Perle and Cheney that they can't really be as bad as they seem to me. But guess what, I think maybe they are.