Bad News: Bird Flu spreads to East Africa.... Good News: You can't catch it by eating chicken!

So the NY Times has reported that the avian bird flu is spreading to North Africa, the Middle East and East Africa, not Western Europe, as Western Europe is not the migration path for disease ridden fowls. This illness has been traveling around for about 8 years now:

"As bird flu has jumped this year from Southeast Asia to China, Russia, Kazakhstan and - more recently - into the Balkan region of Europe, scientists have become somewhat belatedly convinced that wild migratory birds are one of the main carriers of the H5N1 strain of avian influenza."

Europe is meeting Thursday to discuss what should be done when the flue eventually crosses their path. However, East Africa is crossing its path very shortly, if not right at this moment. They cannot afford to slaughter all of their suspicious poultry, for they are one of East African's main sources of products and food. Although one cannot ingest the disease, one can catch it by having physical contact with birds. East Africa also lacks the technology and finance to adequately control the avian sickness.

East Africa is obviously not America, but the migration of this flu can be, has been, and is being compared to the global mass murderer of 1918 and 1919, the Flu Pandemic of 1918. Back in 1918, a flu spread throughout the world and caused in between 30 million and 100 million deaths. Many of these were caused by untreated pneumonia caught during la grippe, as antibiotics were not yet invented. Also, the world was uninformed of it for a while due to War time propaganda. But, there is one definite, undeniable similarity: it was caused by birds. Yes, birds. Yes, like the flu the world is trying to dodge at this moment. The New England Journal of Medicine ecently estimated that if the bird flu recurred as it did in 1918, the planet's casualties would amount in between 180 million and 360 million.