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"Follow that chicken" is not one of the more inspiring lines in the history of detective fiction, nor one of the more frightening in the genre of horror. It's perhaps on the level of that classic grade-Z sci-fi film, Night of the Lepus, in which the giant, rampaging, mutant rabbits were just... well, big bunnies. And yet, don't be fooled, the chicken, probably first domesticated in Southeast Asia some 8,000 years ago, might prove the death of many of us, and for its possible depredations, we are painfully unprepared.
In 1918, a flu epidemic emerged from the trenches of World War I's Western Front -- essentially the war‘s equivalent of the slums -- and swept across the world (twice) ridding it of somewhere between 25 million and 100 million human beings (the equivalent in today's population terms of possibly upwards of a billion people). There have been flu pandemics since, but none faintly on such a scale. For nearly a decade, epidemiologists, public health officials, and veterinary researchers -- by now, in fact just about the whole global medical/scientific community -- have been warning that such a new pandemic is a frightening possibility, if not a near certainty. At the same time, some of them have been performing prodigious genetic detective work as a mutant flu virus, H5N1, has lodged in the systems of wild fowl in southern China, moved into massed domestic fowl populations nearby, and begun to spread to human beings; all the while still genetically evolving in birds (domestic and wild), swine, and even perhaps people, "looking for" the means to leap not just from bird to bird, or bird to swine, or even from bird to human, but from human to human at a staggering rate.
Nothing could more quickly remind us that we humans are part of nature than a flu pandemic; yet three quite unnatural changes in our world have drastically increased the danger of such a pandemic. A livestock revolution has gathered domestic birds together -- think Tyson chickens -- onto giant corporate farms in prodigious numbers, clustering them into what are essentially giant bird slums, where any new disease is guaranteed to spread more easily. Meanwhile, throughout the third world, impoverished human beings have been gathering in far greater urban concentrations than anything imaginable a century ago, and any of these are potential hatcheries for a pandemic. Finally, globalization and global air travel have made the spread of a pandemic, once started, almost instantaneous. In the meantime, H5N1, spreads by an older set of air paths -- avian migration routes -- having just made it to Russia. And we wait.
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