Bloggledygook: Avian Flu: The New Must-Have Accessory For Fall.

Rita is either bearing down on the Gulf Coast or another hyped story for cable news to froth over. We won't know for a while. There are stories all over the Internet (sorry, no links--they're not hard to find and anyway, Jonah Goldberg already has the answer) that a great bulge is forming over what appears to be a Super Volcano in Yellowstone.

Vancouver Island is drifting toward Japan.

Now it seems as if the human species will not be destroyed by fire, as some believe, nor by wind, rain or magma, but by our love for chickens.

NOUMEA, New Caledonia, Sept 20 (Reuters) - The initial outbreak of what could explode into a bird flu pandemic may affect only a few people, but the world will have just weeks to contain the deadly virus before it spreads and kills millions.

Chances of containment are limited because the potentially catastrophic infection may not be detected until it has already spread to several countries, like the SARS virus in 2003. Avian flu vaccines developed in advance will have little impact on the pandemic virus.

It will take scientists four to six months to develop a vaccine that protects against the pandemic virus, by which time thousands could have died. There is little likelihood a vaccine will even reach the country where the pandemic starts.

That is the scenario outlined on Tuesday by Dr Hitoshi Oshitani, the man who was on the frontline in the battle against SARS and now leads the fight against avian flu in Asia.

"SARS in retrospect was an easy virus to contain," said Oshitani, the World Health Organisation's Asian communicable diseases expert.

"The pandemic virus is much more difficult, maybe impossible, to contain once it starts," he told Reuters at a WHO conference in Noumea, capital of the French Pacific territory of New Caledonia. "The geographic spread is historically unprecedented."

Oshitani said nobody knew when a pandemic would occur, it could be within weeks or years, but all the conditions were in place, save one -- a virus that transmitted from human to human.

The contagious H5N1 virus, which has killed 64 people in four Asian countries since it was first detected in 2003, might not be the one to trigger the pandemic, he said. Instead a genetically different strain could develop that passes between humans.

Now, I am trying to keep myself calm about this. I haven't broken through my doctor's defenses to demand Tamiflu, but I do notice that the British government is getting fairly skittish about this already. While most of the stories I have read suggest that the vast number of initial deaths would be in Australia and the Far East, some models show it spreading across the Urals and ultimately into Europe.

The possibility of a mutated strain triggering a pandemic is what has most scientists worried. Governments are in full Blanco mode, caught between panic and paralysis.

I have yet to form much of an opinion on this, save for recognizing possibly too late that Roche would have been a good buy. But then, if half the world is dead, holding stock may be a bit problematic.

So which disaster to worry about? It really is a matter of personal taste. They all have their strong points, and some are more localized than others. But it the interconnected world we live in, sooner or later, some disaster or another is likely to pay each of us a visit.