Bob Dietz Quotations

Many countries in the Western Pacific still do not have a (pandemic) plan of their own -- only seven have completed plans that have been approved by their governments,

But the reality is H5N1 activity in a certain place does not mean that we will see a pandemic start there. It could start anywhere. And as always, poorer nations are more vulnerable to disease than wealthier ones.

Our review of the literature says this appears to be bigger than in the past.

It is embedded. But we still see the need to try to control the virus within the animals that keep it alive --- poultry and wild fowl. It's a frontline response, and one that might not work. But we need to mount as many defenses as we can, if for no other reason than to buy time,

Migratory birds are the main distributors on the international scale and there is no way to stop them. Locally, migratory fowl and the trade in live and recently dead poultry keep it in circulation, too.

We are looking at not just a bacteria being active in one herd of pigs but over a fairly wide area, with isolated villages. Gathering information in that sort of situation is difficult.

Western nations now realize that if they contain this in Southeast Asia, in fact they might minimize the jeopardy to their own citizens. They are now starting to put money into helping these countries develop surveillance systems, helping these countries to prepare to contain this disease within their own countries.

We see this as a serious situation which bears close monitoring. This is a disconcertingly high mortality rate.

We try to stay out of the business of making predictions, but it seems reasonable to assume that the virus will continue to spread to adjacent areas,

A prime task of the WHO experts and their Chinese counterparts will be to conclusively decide if the laboratory was indeed the source of these people's infections.

The more widespread it becomes, the greater the possibility that the (bird flu) virus could become altered and become more of a threat to the human population.

It's not clear to us why we're seeing such a large case number.

In an epidemic, when you have a well informed public you have a far greater chance that there will not be any panic and that they will do things to keep themselves healthy and slow the spread,