Bird flu fearmongering - a seemingly rare opinion...

Now, I am new here, and this is my first post. However, I have been browsing through the bird flu forums, and have noticed that some of you think the bird flu is a hoax, some of you think it's the real deal and we should all be very afraid, and some of you think that it is a ploy to make money from Tamiflu stocks. In my opinion, all of the above, are, to a certain extent, true.

Something I think that has been missed, though, is the fact that on April 1st, 2005, just a few months before this bird-flu panic started to grip the nation (and the world, for that matter) good ole Dubya came out with an executive order that permitted the use of the US military to enforce quarantines on US soil in the event of a bird-flu pandemic. It seems all too convenient, in my opinion. What is his plan? Is he going to unleash this thing on us as a means of total military control?

Well, maybe or maybe not. At any rate, I would like to know how a disease that has existed for so long, and has always been an on-and-off problem for poultry, yet has never infected humans except through contact with infected fowl, could just suddenly "mutate" into a completely different virus that can be transmitted from human-to-human? Moreover, how can we predict such a thing? How can scientists say, "Yep, it'll mutate allright. Better brace for the worst."? It seems completely absurd to me.

I will admit, though, that I am not a pathologist or a biologist or whatever-the-hell I may need to be, but it would be nice to see examples of successful predictions for such viral behavior.

To sum up, these things seem all too manufactured. But I could be wrong. Someone show me how this thing is not some giant setup.