Under the influence

摘要

The British press does love a good panic. It did its best to stir one up over the weekend after some turkeys on a farm in the east of the country contracted influenza of the dreaded H5N1 strain, and it transpired that 160,000 birds were going to have to be killed and cremated in order to stop the disease spreading (see page 32). Questions were asked about whether the government had reacted too slowly in imposing a quarantine zone around the infected farm (no doubt the opposite questions would have been asked had such a zone been imposed as the result of a false alarm). Grave advice was dispensed on whether or not turkey meat was still safe to eat (it is). But most of all, everyone worried about the implications for human health of what is-though it has indeed claimed some human victims-still basically a bird disease.