In 2005, Avian Flu was just a blip in the map relatively speaking. But it seems to be spreading rapidly throughout Europe and Asia. Only 173 cases worldwide have been reported, but 200 million birds have been killed due to the disease spreading among them. The disease is very aggressive; most of the birds that have caught it have died within 48 hours. Experts expect that it will arrive in North America in about 3 to 12 months. The mortality rate for the disease is less than 50 percent; the rate is so high because the disease overcomes the patient very rapidly. Scientists believe that it's very possible that the virus could mutate, thus allowing it to spread more easily from human to human. If that happens, we might just end up having a pandemic on our hands which kills millions of people. Hopefully it's more like SARS, which stayed very contained, but so far, this virus has been able to spread and adapt more easily. Right now, the only people who have caught it have been in close contact with infected birds. Some believe that the high infection rate among the young could be attributed to them playing with infected birds in backyard farms. Many of types of diseases originate because many people in Southeast Asia and China live in close proximity to their animals, thus creating more opportunities to catch bird-bound diseases. Scientists are actually scrambling to find out how the disease spreads. So far, the majority of people it has killed have been under the age of 40. Infants, children and young adults who have very strong immune systems are more vulnerable to the disease. I will say that this is not your average run of the mill flu. Medical research seems to indicate that the young and healthy get more infected because the virus creates what's known as a "cytokine storm" in healthy patients, causing the immune system to overreact to the virus, thus flooding the lungs with too many antibodies. The lungs then eventually shut down and the person ends up literally choking on their own bodily fluids. Since the young have very strong immune systems, this reaction is the net result. Another explanation for this anomaly is that older people have already developed immunity to the flu. The flu strand which caused the Spanish flu epidemic in 1918 was circulating as late as the 1970's, in a much milder form later on obviously. This could explain why mainly older people have immunity, while the young, who have never been exposed to that antigen, catch it. We know that the disease is spread through bodily fluids and can be caught airborne as well. But so far, there has been no significant change in the virus, and that is the good news, at least so far. Hopefully, this wont become the pandemic that the Spanish flu became 90 years ago, where upwards of 50 million people died worldwide. We have already confirmed that it was caused by a strand of avian flu very similar to the one currently in circulation. The bottom line is that such a pandemic would be disastrous today, with medical systems throughout the world becoming excessively burdened by cases. Technology and sanitation have improved significantly since the 1918 pandemic. Also, these diseases behave very strangely, so there's a very good chance that the disease won't become that deadly.

Only a big event for zealots who are desperate for hyperbolic criticism to fling at the president they hate so much.

It ranks right up there with the Ebola and SARS epidemic scares. I doubt it would hit the U.S. though.