Cure Strategy (formerly, Serious Medicine Strategy)

An important new book, The Fatal Strain: On the Trail of Avian Flu and the Coming Pandemic, by Alan Sipress, reviewed in The Washington Post this morning.

H1N1, a.k.a. the swine flu, has proved to be serious public health issue, but not a massive pandemic. But it could be different next time, warns Sipress, who covered South Asia for the Post; he asserts that the pandemic killer will not be H1N1, but rather H5N1, an avian influenza that has killed millions of birds throughout East Asia since the 1990s. And so Sipress concludes, we are “closer to a global pandemic than...in a generation.”

And how will we deal with this threat? Will we have a strategy? We know that we did not have a strategy for swine flu.