Ok, this is really scary.

As if terrorist threats weren't enough to worry about, now this comes out. You probably heard of last year's bird flu in Asia. Well, now the avian flu could pose a far greater threat to everyone on the planet.

This ABC News article says "it could kill a billion people worldwide, make ghost towns out of parts of major cities, and there is not enough medicine to fight it." And forget about a vaccine. That's apparently way into the future. Even Bush is worried (which can't be a good sign,) saying "If left unchallenged, the virus could become the first pandemic of the 21^st century."

Unfortunately, it looks like Bush took too long to react this time as well (what else is new?):

According to Dr. Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, Bush's call to remain on the offensive has come too late.

"If we had a significant worldwide epidemic of this particular avian flu, the H5N1 virus, and it hit the United States and the world, because it would be everywhere at once, I think we would see outcomes that would be virtually impossible to imagine," he warns.

Already, officials in London are quietly looking for extra morgue space to house the victims of the H5N1 virus, a never-before-seen strain of flu. Scientists say this virus could pose a far greater threat than smallpox, AIDS or anthrax.

"Right now in human beings, it kills 55 percent of the people it infects," says Laurie Garrett, a senior fellow on global health policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. "That makes it the most lethal flu we know of that has ever been on planet Earth affecting human beings."

The biggest problem is caused by the fact that our immune system usually can fight off any kind of influenza strain, since it has seen it before in one form or the other. This form of flu, however, has never in history been in our species, so absolutely nobody has any natural immunity to it. Translation: we are all vulnerable, rich and poor, black and white.

"The tipping point, the place where it becomes something of an immediate concern, is where that virus changes, we call it mutates, to something that is able to go from human to human," says Redlener.

Scientists in Asia and around the world are now working around the clock as they wait for that tipping point. So far, scientists say that humans have only been infected by birds. However, they add, "every infected person represents one step closer to the tipping point."

"Once that virus is capable of not needing the birds to infect humans, then we have the beginnings of what can turn out to be this worldwide epidemic problem that the experts call 'pandemics'," Redlener says.

And, thanks to non-stop flights around the world, the avian flu could travel from China to New York within the first week. This is a series of scary quotes about New York City's scene:

"The city would look like a science fiction movie," according to Garrett of the Council on Foreign Relations. "It's extremely possible we'd have to quarantine hospitals. We'd have to quarantine sections of the city."

"There wouldn't be equipment and personnel to staff [hospitals] adequately that you could really call them a hospital," Garrett predicts. "You might more or less call them warehouses for the ailing."

"If you look at the expected number of deaths that could occur in cities across the United States, we are wholly unprepared to process those bodies in a dignified and respectful way," asserts Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy. "We will run out of caskets literally within days."

If the flu does strike, victims at first would not know if it is the kind of easily treated flu that comes every year or the killer flu, which causes severe pneumonia. The draft report of the federal government's emergency plan predicts as many as 200,000 Americans will die within a few months. This is considered a conservative estimate.

Like I said before, it takes a really long time to make a vaccine, at least six months after the first outbreak, and then only in a limited supply. However, recently scientists learned of one medicine's potential to work against the killer flu H5N1, called Tamiflu.

Every country in the world is now stockpiling massive doses of Tamiflu (now sold on a first-come, first-serve basis,) but the US seems to have waited too long, and as a result we lag way behind many other countries. In Great Britain, for instance, officials say they have ordered enough to cover a quarter of their population. For the US to have the same coverage we should have over 70 million doses. The federal plan (inexplicably) only calls for 20 million doses, but we don't even have those: at the moment we only have 2.5 million in all. One tenth of the desired number of doses, which is itself only a third of the percentage of population coverage Britain has so far stockpiled. Unconscionable.

"I think at the moment, with 2.5 million doses, you are pretty vulnerable," warns professor John Oxford of the Royal London Hospital.

"The lack of advanced planning up until the moment in the United States, in the sense of not having a huge stockpile I think your citizens deserve, has surprised me and has dismayed me," he admits.

Even leading Republicans in Congress say the Bush administration has not handled the planning for a possible flu epidemic well (again, what else is new?) Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, said that the current Tamiflu stockpile could spell disaster:

"That's totally inadequate. Totally inadequate today."

"You know, I was down in New Orleans in that crowded airport now a couple weeks ago," Frist says. "And this could be not just equal to that, but many multiple times that. Hundreds of people laid out, all dying, because there was no therapy. And a lot of people don't realize for this avian flu virus, there will be very little effective therapy available early on."

The country's top health officials concede that a killer flu epidemic this winter would make the scenes of Katrina pale in comparison. PALE IN COMPARISON!!

Can you imagine a flu pandemic in the 21^st century that decimated the world population? A ghastly thought to say the least. Unfortunately, it looks like it's only a matter of time before the virus mutates and starts wreaking havoc on the human population.

Scary indeed.