Add avian influenza to list of things to worry about

I have a modest list of worries that includes, among other things, finding a job after graduation and the fact that girls don't seem to like me.

Last week, I added one more item to my list: avian influenza.

Avian flu mainly affects poultry - the virus has killed millions of chickens in Asia and other parts of the world over many decades.

According to the World Health Organization, the United States experienced an avian influenza outbreak in the mid-1980s, which "resulted in the destruction of more than 17 million birds."

Michael Specter recently wrote an article for The New Yorker covering this disease, and he details how a particular strain of avian influenza has shifted from infecting birds to infecting and killing other animals, including humans.

The World Health Organization thinks avian flu has potential to cause the next pandemic, which is an extensive and overwhelming outbreak of a disease.

The World Health Organization believes that a deadlier, more contagious strain of avian influenza might transform our Earth into a fetid hellscape where birds threaten the very existence of mankind.

In this way, the World Health Organization is a lot like Alfred Hitchcock.

So how does a person catch the flu from a duck in the first place? Well, have you ever seen a duck cough? They don't cover their mouth.

Catching this avian flu terrifies me. Understand, I am a weak link in the evolutionary chain, a poor swimmer foundering in the shallow end of the gene pool.

If we were living in caveman times, I wouldn't last.

Nature has dealt me a fragile, temperamental body. I have no body fat, which means I freeze any time the temperature dips below 80, and an underdeveloped bladder forces me to the bathroom every 10 minutes. Also, I look terrible in leopard print.

Imagine the males of the tribe leaving the cave to go hunting. They tell me to stay with the women and sew hides together. "But sewing hurts my fingers," I said.

On the other hand, if I go on the hunt I'll surely be eaten.

"Hey Darrel," one saber-tooth tiger says to his pal. "See that skinny kid who looks awful in the leopard skin?

"You mean the one that's shivering?

"Yeah. Let's eat him the next time he goes in the bushes to pee.

So I worry I might not survive a flu pandemic.

Fortunately, modern man has two tools that might combat such an outbreak: vaccines and anti-viral drugs.

But, as Specter points out, there is enough of neither. He writes that the entire world is capable of producing only 100 million flu vaccines per year. Fewer doses of suitable anti-viral drugs exist.