by Nick Jacobs

There you have it. The end of our worries. We don't need to have a nuclear holocaust to thin out the world's population, nature is planning to do it herself. With six billion or so of us on the planet, 81 million isn't such a large number, but, then, if it's personal, you might just consider paying some attention to this, the latest and direst prediction. Actually this study showed a range of death from 50 to 81 M and decided that the average would be around 62 M, a number that is considerably higher than the 15 to 20 million that they had expected to predict.

This article will be printed in the Lancet and, if the worst prediction, the headline prediction, is true, it will be about 40 M more people than the number lost in the 1918 flu outbreak. In 1957 and 1968 we only lost two million and one million respectively, small numbers compared to this avian flu prediction. Now, if you're from the United States, you can take some comfort in reading that 96% of the deaths will occur in developing nations. If, on the other hand, you are a human being, the location of the tsunami is not really relevant because these are lost human being statistics, not widgets.

So, as we watch our children or grandchildren cry over opening the last of their 34 gifts because they wanted more, and as we see our pharmaceutical companies back away from the desire to produce vaccine for the masses due to our litigious society, we are forced to sit back and say, "Do we have our priorities in line?"

In that same vein, we need to honestly ask, "Could we ever be ready?" At a physician's meeting a few weeks ago, one of the docs was lamenting the fact that the Democrats want universal health coverage for all of the citizens of the United States. He was worried because it would cost an estimated $6 B, only a few billion more than the Iraq war cost this year.

Maybe, we need to verify our humanness and realign our priorities to ensure that 81 M of our friends, relatives, and fellow human beings are not lost to this pending epidemic. Maybe we should begin to take serious steps to ensure that our pharmaceutical friends have the same priorities that we do, and, just maybe, we need to double and triple check the planning mechanisms put in place by the CDC, our State, local and regional agencies to be certain that our assigned staff is "doing all that we can do" to be prepared.