Avian Flu Update #4: Experts Perplexed

The International Herald Tribune reports that scientists who have long expected the H5N1 Avian Flu virus to spread are surprised that just this past weekend, the disease was found in migratory birds in widely disparate places, including northern Germany and Lyon, France. This is after the disease had remained an Asian phenomenon for some time. Notes the article:

International health experts have been predicting widespread outbreaks of the virus for about six months, since concluding that it could be spread by migrating birds. But the acceleration of the disease's appearance has perplexed experts, who had watched the H5N1 virus stick to its native ground in Asia for nearly five years.

This doesn't bode well. Keep praying and keep pressuring your congressional representatives, state legislators, and local officials to take all appropriate actions--from the acquisition of appropriate medicines to plans for the use of auditoria, college dormitories, and church buildings as makeshift hospitals--with deliberate speed.

Previous deadly flu outbreaks have been of the Avian variety and have resulted from mutations those viruses have undergone which make human-to-human passing-on of the disease possible.