No! Of course we weren’t! We never are in these what-if articles and tv documentaries, if we were ready the article would be very boring indeed, the point here is to scare the bejesus out of us so we get off our fat arses and stop allowing the world to go to hell in a handbasket (this almost never works as fear tends to make people cower under the tables more than anything) . The article in question, written in the cutting edge format of a ‘weblog’ (all the rage apparently) is let down a bit by not being sensational and scare-mongering enough for my taste, but Nature is a serious and respected journal (it’d have to be at £10 an issue!) so I guess they probably want to retain that credibility by being scientifically accurate and stuff. Shame Annanova or The Sun don’t run this kind of story, I bet they’d be able to do it in such a way as to induce paralysing panic and mob violence in large swathes of the population.

Also I’m not sure if the last paragraph, comparing a sensible contagion controll strategy to buying planes off Lockheed Martin, is particularly effective, my knee jerk reaction to what is actually a very sensible suggestion was to get annoyed at people buying bombers, kind of missing the point.

[update]
The Register get in on the subject with a calm and reasoned article on the subject of bird flu Bird flu: we’re all going to die.