Michelle Pilecki: Watch the Birdie.

May I interrupt the Rovian food fight long enough to mention a threat to America that could dwarf 9/11? Flying under the headlines, avian flu A (H5N1) has killed only 54 people so far (and an awful lot of birds) in Asia, but the World Health Organization and assorted scientists are worried that the virus could lead to a pandemic that would kill at least 500,000 in the United States, many more world-wide. "Unfortunately, the United States is woefully underprepared to respond in the event of a pandemic outbreak," Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) is quoted in an AP story. There is no vaccine, and U.S. hospitals would be hard-pressed to treat the estimated 2.3 million Americans who would need hospital care.

Our "normal" flu already kills some 36,000 Americans per year, but if we want to know what a pandemic is like and why we need to be prepared, Dr. Richard Feldman helpfully provides the historic view in an op-ed in the Indianapolis Star. Spanish flu in 1918 "killed nearly 700,000 Americans and nearly 40 million worldwide," many more than died in World War I.

Because of the massive numbers of sick, hospitals were overwhelmed and there was a serious shortage of doctors and nurses to care for so many victims. With the massive numbers of dead, bodies literally piled up because of a shortage of coffins and morticians.

H5N1 won't necessarily turn into a pandemic. So far, all cases of human H5N1 occurred in people who caught it from infected birds. The problem -- the big question -- is whether the virus will mutate into a form that could be transmitted between humans. An excellent story in today's Philadelphia Inquirer discusses the evolution of the virus.

Unlike previous pandemics, where a virus underwent a major genetic overhaul all at once, [Michael] Osterholm [director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota] said the avian strain has been changing gradually since it was first identified in 1997. He believes the virus will continue to transform, increasing the likelihood it will ultimately lead to a pandemic.

"We haven't done much to eliminate the source in Asia," said Osterholm, a former bioterrorism special adviser to the current Bush administration. "And there is a dynamic mutation laboratory over there. I see nothing to slow down the mutations."

Though no one has yet made the connection, perhaps the threat of a mutating (i.e. evolving) virus causing a pandemic will help stamp out the epidemic of rampant stupidity in my home state. As if it weren't bad enough that one school board in Pennsylvania's Lancaster County wants to teach "intelligent design" along with biology, now a legislator from Bucks County wants to inflict it on the entire commonwealth, according to The Intelligencer. "Can you tell me one thing true about evolution?" Rep. Paul Clymer is quoted. Evolution isn't some phenomenon that happened long ago, Cly, it's an ongoing process of nature. That's why we need to prepare for new kinds of flu virus every year.

(Full disclosure: I serve on the board of one of the chapters of the ACLU involved in the lawsuit against the Dover School District about the teaching of "intelligent design." I believe in not only evolutionary theory, but also gravitational theory and the Copernican theory, the controversial view that holds that the planets revolve around the sun.)

Editor's note: The most interesting story of the week on this subject was The Washington Post's report that the Chinese used one of the two most powerful antibiotics that might work against this virus in a wholesale dosing of their chickens, thereby helping the virus (you should pardon the expression) evolve a resistance.

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Evolution in action, no matter what those fundamentalists think. [A small clarification. An antibiotic will not work against influenza, which is a virus not a bacterium. They used an antiviral. But the effect on the virus was the same - making it resistant to the antiviral and hampering efforts to defeat the virus.]

The reason that the avian flu is so scary is that we can not easily make a vaccine against it using current methods of production. Flu vaccine is now made using millions of fertilized chicken eggs that are infected with a flu virus. Normally, a flu virus passes from birds to pigs to humans, so there is not a form that can infect both humans and birds. But the avain flu passes directly from birds to humans, infecting both. So, infecting chicken eggs with avain flu kills them, allowing little vaccine to be produced. There are more modern methods being examined, using cell culture to produce the vaccine but they are srtill some years away.  11:43:35 PM    

Harry Shearer: Rummy Spins Russ.

Sunday morning, Donald Rumsfeld made the rounds of the TV yakfests, talking up the war. One of the questions he was predictably asked about was the story in the Times of London, which, despite its Murdochian pedigree, has been raising plenty of Iraq dust lately. This story gave new details to the two-week-old report that the US has been talking with representatives of the insurgency.

One of Rumsfeld's stops was on Meet the Press where, just before going on the air, the old master administered a bit of crucial spin to the host and moderator (and NBC Washington bureau chief). It appeared to work: during the broadcast, Russert let the "no blood on their hands" remark go unchallenged.

Apparently unspun was Bill Kristol on Fox News Sunday, who, despite his history as one of the war's godfathers, noticed and commented upon this crucial paragraph in the Times story:

On the rebel side were representatives of insurgent groups including Ansar al-Sunna, which has carried out numerous suicide bombings and killed 22 people in the dining hall of an American base at Mosul last Christmas.

Don't tell Tim Russert, but we're talking to the terrorists. Unless blood doesn't stay on your hands at Christmastime.

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These guys never fail to amaze me.  11:36:33 PM    

House "Peer Review" Kills Two NIH Grants. Representative says he is correcting skewed funding priorities [ScienceNOW]

Another horrible sign of just how anti-science Republicans are. The idea of independent peer review is something for them to politiize. Even more outrageous is this from another Texas Representative. Simply because the data published does not generate the results he wanted, he wants to use the power of Congress to harass the scientists. The science in their papers has beeen validated and replicated. The science in their critic's papers cherry picked data and have been shown to be statistically incorrect by independent reviewers. Yet, scientists now have to comply with these ridiculous efforts by a Republican to find something that they can use to obfuscate the matter of global warming. Just like the cigarette manufacturers did for years. Instead of working on research or teaching students, these sceintists now have to provide a lot of really unnecessary paperwork for someone who has political motivations. What is it about Texas Congressmen and their fear of science? And I say that as someone who grew up in Texas.  11:22:22 PM    

Whistleblowers Describe Halliburton's "Free Fraud Zone".

"I can unequivocally state that the abuse related to contracts awarded to KBR represents the most blatant and improper contract abuse I have witnessed during the course of my professional career."

-- Bunnatine Greenhouse, top Army Corps of Engineers contract oversight official, turned whistleblower

Today's Democratic Policy Committee Hearing was another jawdropper.

The witnesses included:

1) Greenhouse -- the highest ranking civilian at the Army Corps of Engineers whose job it is to ensure openness and honesty in contracting. Greenhouse said that "essentially every aspect of the RIO contract remained under the control of the Office of the Secretary of Defense." In other words, Rumsfeld should be held responsible for giving his old pal Dick Cheney's firm Halliburton the no-bid contract before the war, under its global logistics contract, a violation of competitive contracting requirements (as Greenhouse testified and 60 Minutes reported, other contractors were itching to bid on the work but were never given a chance).

2) Rory Mayberry, a former manager of Halliburton's mess halls in Iraq, who testified that KBR fed U.S. troops expired food on a daily basis, and fed Turkish and Filipino workers "leftover food in boxes and garbage bags after the troops ate," while using beef, chicken, salads and sodas intended for the troops to cater parties and barbeques for KBR management and employees. He also said he was informed that "if we talked, we would be rotated out to other camps that were under fire."

3) Alan Waller and Gary Butters -- two top executives from Lloyd-Owen International, a transportation contractor who testified that one of their convoys was ambushed 2 kilometers from a U.S. base while bringing materials under a Halliburton contract. Not only were they not told by KBR that other contractors had been hit recently in the same area (they lost 3 individuals in the ambush), but upon arriving at the base were denied help by KBR (later learning from emails they obtained that KBR management had instructed its on site staff to offer no assistance).

Could this have anything to do with the fact that the company has a fuel supply contract with the Iraqi government that KBR would have had, if it hadn't been caught defrauding U.S. taxpayers for fuel shipments?

KBR still controls the military checkpoint along the Kuwait/Iraq border, where Lloyd-Owen has to bring over 100 fuel tankers across on a daily basis. They testified that KBR has hampered the company's ability to cross the border, using the fact that Lloyd-Owen does not have a U.S. Military contract as a technicality.

Meanwhile, they testified that Halliburton's incompetence in restoring fuel pumping and refinery equipment has also slowed fuel deliveries down, leading to the kind of festering resentments that are certain to fuel the resistance.

A joint report was also released at the hearing by Senator Dorgan and Rep. Henry Waxman, which estimates that Halliburton's questioned and unsupported costs in Iraq now exceed $1.4 billion, more than three times the previous estimate.

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Just something to think about when war profiteers comes up in casual conversation.  10:18:45 PM