When I started thinking about topics for my virology paper I drew a blank. Then I remembered that I was beginning to hear a lot about a new flu virus on the news. I was curious about it and I didn't know very much about it, because on the news they don't tell you the specifics of the virus, they just tell you where it is and how much devastation it has caused. As I searched the internet I found mounds and mounds of information pertaining to the so called "bird flu", or, to be a little bit more scientific, "avian flu." Named so because it originates in birds and, so far, has only been found to be transferred between animals of that species. I found two articles from the same website, BBC News. I chose these two because the BBC is a respected, national news organization and because, I thought, having two articles from the same site would improve credibility by assuring even, fair reporting. As I have stated, my articles are both from BBC news' website. Their home site can be found at http://news.bbc.co.uk. My particular articles however, came from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3497355.stm and http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3505739.stm. The first articled that I found was put on the web on Sunday, February 22 of this year, written by Ray Dunne, and is titled Killer Flu: Could the World Cope? The other article was posted on Friday, February 20 (two days prior to the first) and it is titled Drug Effective Against Avian Flu. The writer of the second article is not given. I found both of the articles on March 4th of this year.
             The "Killer Flu" article starts by going over the 3 major flu pandemics in the last 100 years. It brings up the 1918 Spanish flu, the 1957 Asian flu, and the Hong Kong flu of 1968. They estimate that these three pandemics claimed about 52 million lives worldwide. I found the next line to be a bit of ominous foreshadowing as it states, "It has been 36 years s...