The flu pandemic preparedness snowball / by Peter M. Sandman.

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Trying to arouse concern about anything is pushing a rock uphill. But if you?re lucky, the rock gets to the top of the hill and starts rolling down the other side. As it gains mass as well as momentum, it converts to a snowball. Of course there?s more than one hill; your rock/snowball is likely to need more pushing before long. Still, the snowball phase is certainly worth noting, and celebrating. That?s where flu pandemic preparedness is right now. During the past two weeks, U.N. head Kofi Annan appointed a new pandemic 'coordinator,' David Nabarro, whose maiden speech used a higher upper-end worldwide death prediction (150 million) than any of his World Health Organization colleagues had previously voiced. In the U.S., which has lagged behind many other developed countries by some measures of preparedness (antiviral stockpiles, domestic vaccine production capacity, and candid warnings to the public, for example), Democrats and Republicans vied with each other to see who could most aggressively insist that 'we?re not prepared,' and actually cooperated in several legislative efforts to get better prepared. Two research teams published studies showing marked similarities between the mother of all flu pandemics in 1918 and the H5N1 virus now looming over much of Asia. Whatever measure of buzz you want to use - radio talk show topics, website hits, lists of most-emailed articles, street corner conversations, even naysayers? what?s-all-the-fuss-about columns - the effort to try to get the world (at least the first world) ready for a bird flu pandemic had a good fortnight. This column will be a potpourri of miscellaneous warnings and quibbles about pandemic risk communication as it seems to be evolving.