IN THE MAIL: Dr. Grattan Woodson’s The Bird Flu Preparedness Planner.

A couple of other avian flu items here and here. As I’ve noted before, regardless of whether avian flu ever becomes a deadly human pandemic, the likelihood is fairly high that we’ll see some sort of deadly pandemic in the next decade or two. And most flu preparations will also help in the case of some other dangerous disease outbreak.

Also, on a not entirely unrelated subject, Paul Collier’s The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It. Overall, the world is getting richer, even most of the world’s poor. But there are still a lot of dirt-poor people out there, and that raises the risk of disease outbreaks.