> So why the hell are we supposed to be afraid of this again?
> So far from what I have heard, there have only been 3 humans
> who have gotten this. And they only got it recently. Also,
> the 3 were all in china, and they were all poultry farmers.
> So why the hell are we spending so much money on a cure for
> a disease that only 3 people, out of over a billion in china
> alone, have actually gotten?
Because your data is either old or just plain false.
So far,
H5N1 has infected 124 people and killed 63.
As for what people are worried about:
The worst case scenario for a H5N1 pandemic is around 150,000,000 human deaths directly due to H5N1 infection (or two to three percent of the world's human population). No one knows what the chances are for this worst case scenario.
"Influenza viruses keep changing. They mutate. And they exchange genetic material with other flu viruses, a process called reassortment. All that’s needed is a mutation or reassortment that produces a new variant of H5N1 — one that’s as deadly as the current strain but as easily transmitted from human to human as lots of other flu strains. Most virologists believe something like this will happen sooner or later, and many believe it will happen soon. When it does, H5N1 will inevitably spread throughout the world. Worldwide mortality estimates range all the way from 2–7.4 million deaths (the “conservatively low†pandemic influenza calculation of a flu modeling expert at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) to 1 billion deaths (the bird flu pandemic prediction of one Russian virologist). The estimates of most H5N1 experts range less widely but still widely. In an H5N1 pandemic, the experts guess that somewhere between a quarter of us and half of us would get sick, and somewhere between one percent and five percent of those who got sick would die — the young and hale as well as the old and frail. If it’s a quarter and one percent, that’s 16 million dead; if it’s a half and five percent, it’s 160 million dead. Either way it’s a big number." (from Wikipedia)
What's really scary is that this happened before. In 1918,
Spanish flu (another avian flu) mutated to become infectious to humans. 25 to 50 million died.
