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COPYRIGHT 2005 Newsweek, Inc. All rights reserved. Any reuse, distribution or alteration without express written permission of Newsweek is prohibited. For permission: www.newsweek.com
Byline: Jerry Adler (With Pat Wingert in Washington, Rod Nordland in London, Alexandra A. Seno in Hong Kong, Joe Cochrane in Jakarta, Karen Springen in Chicago, Claudia Kalb in New York, Mary Carmichael in Boston and Melinda Liu in Beijing Graphics by Andrew Romano, Karl Gude and Steve Walkowiak, Josh Ulick, Kevin Hand and Graham Roberts)
One parrot, imported from South America and held in quarantine in Britain, along with a shipment of birds from Taiwan.
One swan, in the Romanian village of C.A. Rosetti, near the border with Ukraine.
One man, Bangorn Benpad, 48, a sometime driver and gardener in the Thai province of Kanchanaburi, who had helped himself on a couple of occasions to chickens from a neighbor's flock. The flock had been dying off, and the chickens he took were close to death anyway. Days after he killed, plucked, grilled and ate the birds, he developed a cough and a fever and visited a local clinic, where they took an X-ray of his lungs and suggested he check himself into a hospital. Instead, he went home, but last Monday his condition worsened, and a new X-ray showed a rapid deterioration in his lungs. By Wednesday he was dead.
In ordinary times these deaths last week would have gone unnoticed by the world at large, but this is not an ordinary time: the world is on edge, stalked by a virus that travels the great migratory flyways and kills where it lands. After incubating for eight years in East Asia, where it was responsible for the death of 140 million birds (including those intentionally destroyed to stop its spread) and 68 people, the H5N1 variant of avian flu suddenly and mysteriously expanded its range this year, north to Mongolia and Siberia, then west into Ukraine, Croatia and Turkey. Through innumerable generations and hundreds of mutations, it maintained its extraordinary lethality, without yet evolving the ability to be transmitted directly between people. Almost all cases have involved people who came into close contact with chicken blood or droppings; when and if that changes, it could be the trigger for a global pandemic that, in a worst-case extrapolation from the toll of the 1918 Spanish flu, could kill 150 million people--2.5 percent of the world's population--in a matter of months. Epidemiologist Michael Osterholm of the University of Minnesota calls that scenario "the single greatest risk to our world today." Governments--indeed, civilizations--have collapsed...
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