Be prepared

With policies on poultry inoculation, vaccine production, and pricing in flux, fighting bird flu is a matter of planning, not panic | Marvin Olasky

The first book of Kings relates that when Elijah's servant looked toward the sea he saw nothing. Seven times Elijah told him to look again, "and at the seventh time he said, 'Behold, a little cloud like a man's hand is rising from the sea.' . . . And in a little while the heavens grew black with clouds and wind, and there was a great rain."

For the past year health officials have been scanning small, isolated stories of bird flu transmission, hoping that the H5N1 strain was not mutating to a form that could spread easily by person-to-person rather than bird-to-person transmission. If that happened, a pandemic with millions of deaths would be likely.

Then last month World Health Organization officials discovered evidence that six of seven people in an Indonesian family died after being infected by one family member who coughed frequently within a small room. The officials found "no evidence of significant mutations," but the incident put bird flu in the headlines once again, and raised questions of how well the United States and other countries are prepared for what could become a great rain.