BRACING FOR BIRD FLU.

This article discusses the way that health officials in Canada are preparing for a possible breakout of the avian flu. For months now the warnings have been relentless: the avian flu, rampaging through Southeast Asia, could morph into some sort of monstrous microbe. Currently, this particular strain has devastated commercial poultry flocks in Vietnam, Cambodia, South Korea, Thailand, Indonesia, Japan, Hong Kong and large parts of China. This much is true: H5N1 has a lot of people worried, and for a host of good reasons. Still, a significant segment of the health-care community questions whether this particular bird flu will be the one that triggers a pandemic. Neither the flu nor the threat of a pandemic should be taken lightly, says Dr. Richard Schabas, chief of staff at York Central Hospital in Richmond Hill, Ont., and a former chief medical officer of health for Ontario. Earl Brown, a University of Ottawa professor who specializes in flu virus evolution, says that while H5N1 concerns him, suggestions it could kill one in six people on the planet are way out of line. The 1918 Spanish flu killed so massively because of circumstances unlikely to repeat themselves, argues Paul Ewald, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Louisville in Kentucky. The H5N1 strain was first discovered in Hong Kong in 1997, where six of 18 hospitalized patients died. Infection was linked to bird farms and markets teeming with live poultry. There have been three serious pandemics in the past century: 1918 and two milder outbreaks, which nevertheless killed millions, in 1957 and 1968.