Avian influenza is a viral asteroid on a collision course with humanity. Since the horrific autumn of 1918, when a novel influenza killed more than 2 percent of humanity in a few months, scientists have dreaded the reappearance of a wild flu strain totally new to the human immune system.

The flu subtype known as H5N1, which claimed its first victims in Hong Kong in 1997, is that nightmare come true. Now endemic in waterfowl and poultry throughout East Asia, it is the most lethal strain of influenza ever seen, killing chickens, people and even tigers with terrifying ease.

Although avian flu officially has taken fewer than 100 human lives so far (mainly farmers and their children in daily contact with poultry), most experts believe that H5N1 is on the verge of acquiring the new genes or amino acids that would enable it to travel at pandemic velocity across a densely urbanized world, with the potential, warns the World Health Organization, to cause 20 million deaths.

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