Keith Bradsher and Elisabeth Rosenthal (Extracted from "China to Vaccinate All Its Poultry", New York Times, 16 November 2005)

"China's Agriculture Ministry said Tuesday that it would inject all of the nation's 5.2 billion chickens, geese and ducks with a vaccine against bird flu. The campaign, disclosed by the official New China News Agency, would be the largest single vaccination effort ever for any species, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome. It promises to be logistically complicated, not least because it entails chasing and catching billions of free-range birds. The Agriculture Ministry did not provide a timetable."

[Ed: Western Europe's Micawber-esque attitude to Asian bird 'flu -- "All will come right on the day" -- and the UK's variant -- "Our National Health Service will cope" -- are to be contrasted with the Chinese proposal. If the fundamental strain of H5N1 can be eliminated at source with a specific vaccine, then the human-to-human mutation cannot take place. If the other South-East Asian nations that raise billions of poultry in family flocks follow suit then there's a chance that a pandemic will not ensue. The virus has already shown its capacity to mutate, and there may not now be time to prevent the mutation that will prove deadly to humans in their millions. But the Chinese, being distinctly more intelligent than most, have proposed the first strategy that might work.]