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Meanwhile, many are hoarding their own stockpiles of drugs. The Washington Post reported that 1.7 million prescriptions were filled in the US during the first eight months of 2005, three times the rate in 2004. The hoarding of drug stockpiles is not illegal, but government officials feel that stockpiling is a poor idea because the indiscriminate use of antiviral drugs may expedite the emergence of drug-resistant H5N1 strains. The evolution of a drug-resistant virus may be further encouraged by the fact that several countries are taking steps toward manufacturing their own bird flu drugs. Despite the announcement that Roche, the sole supplier of the anti-viral Tamiflu, would begin negotiating with four other companies to license its production, Taiwanese health officials decided to continue to manufacture their own generic version of Tamiflu that was “99 percent” identical. By the time an influenza epidemic begins, the virus may already be resistant to the drugs that we have prepared.

Furthermore, Secretary Leavitt has announced that the US does not have the manufacturing capacity to produce the necessary number of vaccines: “We need the ability to isolate a virus and convert it to a vaccine for 300 million people – and we need to do that in six months. That capacity doesn’t exist… [the process] will be measured in years, not months.”

While the US now seems to be hurriedly scrambling to prepare for a possible viral epidemic, China, the first country infected with the H5N1 virus, has taken little action since the 1997 outbreak and is still woefully unprepared to deal with widespread infection. This is a problm because there is hardly a better breeding ground in the world for a bird flu pandemic. China is home to 1.3 billion people and more than ten times that number of chickens, ducks, and other domestic poultry. Seventy-five percent of China’s citizens live on farms that house 70% of the world’s pigs, each of which could be a potent “mixing vessel” for virus mutation and re-assortment.

Both the Spanish Flu and the current H5N1 virus attack deep within the lung, destroying tissue and also provoking what some scientists dub an “immune system storm:” these viruses cause the hyper-production of cytokines, the body’s primary chemical messengers, causing a ubiquitous hemorrhage in the lungs, literally drowning victims in their own fluids. And just like the 1918 virus, H5N1 does not decrease in virulence when it crosses the species barrier. For this reason, almost no living thing has immunity to the avian flu virus. To make matters worse a comparative study of the two strains has concluded that the H5N1 already has five of the ten mutations that made the 1918 virus so deadly.

While the progress that is being made is hopeful, we are still far from being able to contain and combat the bird flu. The perennial arms race against disease has now reached a critical juncture and the wheels have begun turning in the efforts to contain this emerging disease. The world now hopes that they have not started too late.