Coming, ready or not

摘要

The threat of a global pan-demic is rising again. In China an influenza virus never before seen in people had, as The Economist went to press, infected at least 82 and killed 17. Meanwhile a new type of coronavi-rus, the family that brought severe acute respiratory syndrome (sars), is festering in the Middle East. The risk of such an outbreak turning into a pandemic is low, but the danger, if it does, is huge: in 1918 5om-ioom people were killed by Spanish flu, compared with 16m in the first world war and 30m so far from aids.