COLBY COSH is worried about bird flu and thinks preparations are inadequate. Colby writes:

Our one true weakness may be a general unfamiliarity with large-scale infectious disease — our lifelong experience of medicine as virtually omnipotent. Our post-Victorian forebears could be killed anytime by an ear infection or an inflamed scratch; they possessed few illusions about death. And yet they were almost unnervingly cheerful in the face of pestilence. In Edmonton, one November 1918 flu circular from the authorities concluded with the words “Keep smiling.” Even after four years of wartime slaughter and austerity — years endured only to be punctuated by global disease — no one thought this cretinous or trivial. The recriminations and carping that accompanied SARS, which took only 800 lives worldwide, suggest we may not bear up nearly so well if Big Flu really does emerge.

My great-great grandmother (who I never knew, but who my grandmother still talks about with great admiration and affection) worked at the Alabama Boys’ Industrial School during the 1918 flu epidemic and was for a while the only unaffected adult there. The sheer burden of trying to look after so many people who couldn’t really look after themselves (she organized the barely-functional to help the nonfunctional somewhat) nearly killed her, they say, but her collapse didn’t come until some people had recovered.

Yet the general tendency is to underestimate the pluck of modern folks — look at what happened on 9/11 — and while people do panic in the face of epidemics, there’s nothing new about that, either. Of course, preparation now beats panic later, and may even obviate the need.

Tamiflu is supposed to be fairly effective against bird flu, and governments are stockpiling it. But there won’t be enough for everyone. And, as with warfare, logistics gets less attention, but it often as important as the sexy stuff.

UPDATE: Derek Lowe says that guys like him are unlikely to be producing miracle drugs in the midst of an epidemic.