I'm taking this with a grain of salt, it's on my radar, but only at about the level Y2k was, or the New Madrid fault going off in a 7.5 on the Richter. Possible, but not very probable, yet. However we are overdue for a pandemic of some sort or another. It's been almost 100 years since the last bad one. With nearly six times the population and modern air travel, one wonders why it hasn't happened yet.
There is a chance a pandemic could be stopped by modern health services and epidemiology. It's possible that the strategy of applying the limited supply of anti-virals, and any vaccines to the appropriate "hot spots" could contain it. However, vaccines are a challenge. Even working at WARP SPEED, it takes months to isolate the right virus, then start production. It's hard to make a vaccine in advance.
I mainly worry because my wife and I have four little girls still in diapers, two sets of twins 11 months apart. (oops!
) If it gets truly bad here in the US, (significant deathcount, hospitals overflowing etc.) I'll have to think long and hard about moving out of the house to my parents so I can continue to work and travel in public, pay the bills, and leave groceries and baby formula etc. on the porch for my wife untill the worst passes. Unless I could be certain that babies two and under would be a triage priority to receive anti-virals, I see no other way.
Bird flu could amount to nothing more than an inconvenient livestock problem, or it could infect someone already suffering with a "human" influenza virus. Then, there's a chance the bird flu (deadly, but not very human-human transmissable) could trade DNA/RNA with the human flu (not very deadly, but very transmissable). Then we'd be in a world of hurt.
Speaking of pandemics, whatever happened to SARS?
Good question! That's why it's so hard for the average person to truly gauge the threat. Media attention to an issue is hardly an accurate barometer of danger. Even looking at things one would think ought to be accurate indicators of danger, like government response, dosen't tell the whole story. The government itself might just be making preparations out of fear it would look like they "aren't doing enough" under the scrutiny of the media. Then because the government is making all these preparations, the media takes note and the vicious cycle repeats itself.
OTOH, the media attention could help the situation, goading the appropriate people into action. We'll never know how bad Y2k would have been if it had not been hyped so heavily. I doubt it would have been even close to a major disaster, but it could have been a major inconvenience if all the calendar bugs hadn't been fixed.
