GOOD NEWS AND BAD NEWS ON AVIAN FLU, from Britain:

So, let’s see, we’ve had a Nobel Prize Winner in Medicine telling us that an outbreak of flu, a pandemic, is inevitable. We have a candidate in the current avian flu. And our public health authorities (one of the few justifications for Government that even the most rigid libertarian would support) do nothing for 8 months. Wonderful, what a stunning justification of the current system.

Ouch. Even if avian flu turns out not to materialize as a threat this time around, this is exposing problems that need to be fixed, as some sort of major disease outbreak is pretty much inevitable sooner or later.