Fergie's Tech Blog

H5N1 News: Newsweek -- The Fight Against the Flu

One parrot, imported from South America and held in quarantine in Britain, along with a shipment of birds from Taiwan.

One swan, in the Romanian village of C.A. Rosetti, near the border with Ukraine.

One man, Bangorn Benpad, 48, a sometime driver and gardener in the Thai province of Kanchanaburi, who had helped himself on a couple of occasions to chickens from a neighbor's flock. The flock had been dying off, and the chickens he took were close to death anyway. Days after he killed, plucked, grilled and ate the birds, he developed a cough and a fever and visited a local clinic, where they took an X-ray of his lungs and suggested he check himself into a hospital. Instead, he went home, but last Monday his condition worsened, and a new X-ray showed a rapid deterioration in his lungs. By Wednesday he was dead.

In ordinary times these deaths last week would have gone unnoticed by the world at large, but this is not an ordinary time: the world is on edge, stalked by a virus that travels the great migratory flyways and kills where it lands.

posted by Fergie @ 10/24/2005 08:00:00 PM