In that great Hitchcock thriller, the birds start attacking Tippi Hedron (Melanie Griffith’s mom, for trivia fans) in Mendocino for no particular reason.Today, Ms. Hedron works actively in films, international relief efforts and for animal causes.She may get an ironic opportunity to combine her charity works with birds again, because scientists around the world are looking nervously at the increasing possibility of a return of avian influenza, also known as the bird flu.First identified in Italy in 1900, it is the H5N1 virus implicated in the great Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-1919 that killed about 40 million people.I say “implicated in” instead of “caused,” because it was government policies that made the death toll much higher than it needed to be.But there is no doubt H5N1 is a major killer.
There are three steps H5N1 has to go through in order to get to people.First, there needs to be a lot of infected birds.Almost 200 million chickens have been killed or died in Asia in the last year due to avian flu infection.Strike One. Next, unless someone eats diseased poultry, the flu has to cross species into an animal that can easily infect...