Inter cover story vention is the best prevention

摘要

Each day weftead the news, more questions are raised: China, Korea, Nigeria, Greece, Italy, Germany, Russia, Poland and Scotland, where will it stop? Is it so much a matter of where or when - of if? Do wecon-tinue to worry and plari and strate-gize and prepare, or should we simply calm down and let our respective equally-perplexed governments handle things for us? Are we on the verge of an ultimate worldwide pandemic; one in which the AIH5N1 virus will jump from species to species and become the plague of the century? Do we dare hope that established health organizations such as the NIH, CDC and WHO, combined with private industry and research, will find an effective vaccine to battle a mutated form of H5N1 that heretofore doesn't even exist? Or will this deadly health concern remain relatively localized to one hemisphere of the globe? No matter how we answer these questions, we lose, don't we? Considering today's cosmopolitan economy and jet-setting tendencies, not to mention the migratory and mating habits of Asian waterfowl through the Bering Strait, how can we possibly presume that half of the world will remain insular and immune?