Bird-flu watching

Medicine | Better to wash hands than wait for a vaccine with this potential pandemic | Lynde Langdon

President Bush met with U.S. vaccine developers on Oct. 7, not long after reading a gruesome history of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic. The 500-plus page book by John M. Barry tells how 40 million of the world's youngest, healthiest people died horrifically, bleeding from their ears and noses and turning blue from lack of oxygen. The book also skewers military and government officials who ignored warnings about poor public health conditions in barracks and cities.

At the meeting, President Bush reportedly urged U.S. drug companies to increase their capacity to produce a vaccine for a new strain of avian influenza inching west across the globe. European Union members met Oct. 18 after the virus appeared in poultry on a Greek island in the Aegean Sea. Its emergence in Greece, the first EU member nation affected, followed cases in poultry in Turkey and Romania. Though more than 60 people have died of the virus in Asia, no human cases have been reported in Europe.