My friend and fellow-Bihari Neeraj Priyadarshi has sent these pictures he took at Navapur after the arrival of the avian flu. This is what Mike Davis had written last year: “Deadly avian flu is on the wing. The first bar-headed geese have already arrived at their wintering grounds near the Cauvery River in the southern Indian state of Karnataka. Over the next ten weeks, 100,000 more geese, gulls, and cormorants will leave their summer home at Lake Qinghai in western China, headed for India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, and, eventually, Australia.”

More from Davis: “An unknown number of these beautiful migrating birds will carry H5N1, the avian flu subtype that has killed 61 people in Southeast Asia and which the World Health Organization (WHO) fears is on the verge of mutating into a pandemic form like that which killed 50 to 100 million people in the fall of 1918. As the birds arrive in the wetlands of South Asia, they will excrete the virus into the water where it risks spreading to migrating waterfowl from Europe as well as to domestic poultry. In the worst-case scenario, this will bring avian flu to the doorstep of the dense slums of Dhaka, Kolkata, Karachi, and Mumbai.”

Outlook Magazine provides an update on the flu situation in India. Please read Mike Davis, The Monster At Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu, published by the New Press. And thank you, Neeraj.