Avian flu has been news for a while. But a possible yet unlikely danger to Americans now sounds a lot like certain armageddon:
Hundreds of millions sick. More than 100 million dead. Factories and schools closed or turned into hospital wards.
That could be the nightmare touched off by a global attack of bird flu, some health experts say.
This article goes on to detail people's panic over the possibility of a bird flu pandemic and the lack of medication to treat it. Michigan doctors are quoted as saying they refuse patients who ask for the drugs, because they don't have any.
The health experts referenced in the lead? Not so much.
The article is full of reactions, but to what? No medical officials are in there to give context to the possibility of it coming to America, or being transferred among humans.
MSNBC's angle on calming fears about the flu gets right to the point in the third sentence.
Is there reason for Americans to worry? Not much, say officials.
Expository information about the flu strain and quotes from agriculture experts may not be colorful, and science may not be a sexy topic. But for readers bombarded with stories that forecast impending doom, it's news.
Michelle Crowley @ November 2, 2005 - 9:38pm
I was going to do a similar blog on this after reading yet another horrifying ABC flu story online. After an entire story about the impending doom and mayhem (and it's always only about Americans), they have this at the bottom of their sensational story: "There is no certainty that H5N1 will mutate into a human-to-human transmissible virus," said Leavitt. But he warned, "There will be another virus at another time." Might have beeen good to push that key factor a bit higher up, but then people wouldn't keep reading, I guess.
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