I noticed that a news report is indicating the first human-to-human spread of the bird flu in Indonesia. Actually I think this may have happened about 1 or 2 years ago in a hospital in Vietnam--a nurse was infected from a patient, but I never saw the finish of that story.
It is interesting to see how little news there is about the bird flu in America and also how little concern people seem to have. I sensed that in Europe, certainly at least in Vienna, there was extensive concern about the bird flu. In fact two women I heard talking almost seemed at the point of panic--they were talking about stockpiling antiobiotics and how to protect their children. I saw bird cages in a small children's zoo covered in some kind of green fabric to prevent wild birds from spreading it to these captive birds. Some people in north Germany seemed to be on the verge of hysteria because cats had become infected. The infection also was found in an enclosed turkey farm building in France.
Americans probably will not become preoccupied with this issue until the first infected bird is found in North America. The last great flu epidemic occurred near the end of World War I and many people did not even realize what was happening. It is now a distant memory, even to me, but in the late 1940s and early 1950s the polio scare struck America.
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one of our faculty meetings at school was a plea for volunteers for the Emergency Preparedness Organization for Gregg County. I guess our school "might" be one of the sites (it's a secret to those who aren't signed up volunteers). Bird flu was one of the things that concerned a lot of my fellow teachers at the meeting...
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