I'm not sure "how scared we should be" - rather less than the commercial news networks would have us believe, I suspect. If you're looking to inform yourself about avian influenza (aka 'bird flu'), Flu Wiki is a good place to start.
Update: I just can't resist The Onion's Nation's Leading Alarmists Excited About Bird Flu.
Comments
More avian flu resources, and a note on the Connotea resources
Hi, I'm the keeper of the avian flu firehose on Connotea -- its meant to be used via its RSS feed as a sort of daily newswire. At Nature we also have an updated focus section on avian flu. I've also made some rough Google Earth maps of avian flu outbreaks, that will be refined when I get a moment.
Declan
NCBI Influenza Virus Resource
Maybe also interesting in this context: A database of all influenza sequences in Genbank is provided by the NCBI.
links on Connotea
I found Nature journalist Declan Butler's 'AvianFlu'-tagged links on Connotea to be a useful resource too, though it's quite a firehose of information.
Have seen an interesting
Have seen an interesting post on Instapundit blogged a few times... "is avian flu being overhyped?". It's a letter from a doctor at the University of Chicago saying that we're much better prepared to deal with a flu pandemic than we were in 1918, so no worries.
Though I agree with what he writes, I couldn't help thinking: sure, with the help of modern medicine we shouldn't have that much to fear, but isn't any possible avian flu pandemic a logistical nightmare rather than a medical one? We know how to treat it, will know how to vaccinate people against it in fairly short order and so on but that's no good if you don't have enough hospital beds / respirators / vaccines to go round.
Quite
The logistics angle may be the defining criterion for pandemic threat status. That we are more prepared now than in 1918 is a disingenuous point to make - there is a much greater population to contend with, travel (and hence geographical spread) is much faster, and our medical facilities - where they exist - are probably under more strain than a century ago.
We didn't stop AIDS, and we didn't stop Ebola (it wiped itself out). Granted, we didn't know how to cure those diseases. But we do know a lot about TB, and we don't seem able to stop a resurgence of resistant strains - everyone just seems to be praying very hard it doesn't escalate. And that's a bug, not a virus, which would normally make it easier to treat...
It seems to non-specialist me that the one thing that is really keeping a serious wave of infection at bay is the relatively low frequency of transmission from animal to human host, and the even lower ability of the virus to spread between humans. But how long will that last? Any virologists care to comment?