Scott McPherson's Web Presence

LE TELEGRAM

TO: MONSIEUR BERNARD VALLAT

FROM: OIE BOARD OF DIRECTORS

SUBJECT: YOUR COMMENTS RE H5N1

MONSIEUR VALLAT STOP OUTBREAK OF H5N1 GROWING TO ALARMING DIMENSIONS IN BANGLADESH STOP ALSO SITUATION IN INDIA WORSENING BY THE HOUR STOP FARMERS NOT HEEDING CALL TO CULL BIRDS BECAUSE YOU SAID SITUATION OVERBLOWN STOP OUR OWN FRENCH GOVERNMENT RAISED BIRD FLU ALARM LEVEL BECAUSE OF OUTBREAK OF H5N1 IN SWANS JUST ACROSS CHANNEL FROM US STOP YOUR CLARIFICATION DID NOTHING TO DISCOURAGE NAYSAYERS LIKE JOHN BIRCH SOCIETY FROM QUOTING YOU STOP SINCE WHEN DID JOHN BIRCHERS BECOME EXPERTS IN MICROBIOLOGY ANYWAY STOP WE JUST CONFIRMED OUTBREAK OF H5N1 IN IRANIAN POULTRY STOP ALSO CONFIRMED OUTBREAK OF H5N1 IN UKRAINE STOP W.H.O. NOW SAYS TEN CLADES OF H5N1 NOW EXIST SIMULTANEOUSLY AROUND THE WORLD WHICH INVALIDATES YOUR CLAIM THAT H5N1 IS EXTREMELY STABLE STOP SO WOULD YOU PLEASE STOP TALKING ABOUT H5N1 STOP STOP STOP STOP

You may recall that in December, 2006, an article appeared in MSBNC.com.

Govt. is looking in wrong place for bird flu Birds from Latin America most likely to bring virus to U.S., study says

WASHINGTON - Birds from Latin America — not from the north — are most likely to bring deadly bird flu to the main U.S., researchers said Monday, suggesting the government might miss the H5N1 virus because biologists have been looking in the wrong direction.

The United States’ $29 million bird flu surveillance program has focused heavily on migratory birds flying from Asia to Alaska, where researchers this year collected tens of thousands of samples from wild birds nesting on frozen tundra before making their way south.

Those birds present a much lower risk than migratory birds that make their way north from South America through Central America and Mexico, where controls on imported poultry are not as tough as in the U.S. and Canada, according to findings in the latest Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Nations south of the U.S. import hundreds of thousands of chickens a year from countries where bird flu has turned up in migratory birds or poultry, said A. Marm Kilpatrick, lead author of the study.

Poultry trade riskier than migratory birds
“The risk is actually higher from the poultry trade to the Americas than from migratory birds,” said Kilpatrick, of the Consortium for Conservation Medicine in New York. Other researchers on the study came from the Smithsonian Institution.

If bird flu arrives in Mexico or somewhere farther south, it could be a matter of time before a migratory bird carries the virus to the United States, Kilpatrick said.

“It’s not just a matter of worrying about who you trade with, but it’s a matter of thinking about who do your neighbors trade with, and who do your trading partners trade with,” Kilpatrick said. “We need to be looking both south and north.”

The study concluded that “current American surveillance plans that focus primarily on the Alaskan migratory bird pathway may fail to detect the introduction of H5N1 into the United States in time to prevent its spread into domestic poultry.”

The report is the first to combine the DNA fingerprint of the H5N1 virus in different countries with data on the movement of migratory birds and commercial poultry in those countries.

The analysis helped to determine, for example, that the outbreak of bird flu in Turkey likely didn’t come from poultry imports from Thailand, as previously thought. Instead, the probable source was migratory birds in Russia, where the virus had similar DNA to the virus in Turkey.

The study found that:

• Bird flu was spread through Asia by the poultry trade.
• Most of the spread throughout Europe was from migratory birds.
• Bird flu spread into Africa from migratory birds as well as poultry trade.

U.S. officials cautioned that the study is not the final authority on the spread and prevention of bird flu.

'A big puzzle'
“When you look at scientific literature, it’s a big puzzle. This puts in a few more pieces,” said David Swayne, director of the Agriculture Department’s Southeast Poultry Research Laboratory in Athens, Ga.

Swayne cautioned that researchers looked only at countries’ import restrictions through 2005.

“I’m not saying it’s the fault of the study; the study is designed to look at what happened in the past,” Swayne said. “We have to be very careful not to over-interpret. There is a limit on how recent the data is.”

In addition, Agriculture Department officials said they are not focusing exclusively on Alaska.

More resources have been spent in Alaska than in other states so far, but testing is happening throughout the lower 48, and the U.S. is even helping Mexico do surveillance, said Tom DeLiberto, the department’s National Wildlife Disease Coordinator.

“We have more information now than we did when we designed the surveillance effort last fall,” DeLiberto said.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16043274

When that article ran, I called my sources at the University of Florida (Go Gators! Go Tebow!). UF has an ongoing program designed to map the migratory routes of wild birds throughout South America, but the program has met with little overall success. The reasons? Among other things, that region is a hotbed of geopolitical instability. Unlike in North America and Europe, many South American and Central American nations palpably don't like each other very much. Drug cartels, Maoist guerrillas, and despots abound. Their level of distrust is heightened by the shenanigans of such wretched types as Venezuela's tyrant-in-training, Hugo Chavez, and his clear efforts at destabilizing the region. For those who take issue: Newsweek's expose regarding how Chavez and his "reform" proposals got their asses kicked in the recent elections and the Venezuelan military's declaration that if Chavez tried to overturn the election results (he tried, oh how he tried to overturn them) would prompt a coup de tat, they sat down and "negotiated" a face-saving 51% to 49% defeat. What a cur.

But I digress. Fact of the matter is, there are pitifully few well-mapped migratory wildfowl routes in the Americas south of Mexico. This seriously hampers efforts at surveillance, because if you don't know where the birds migrate to and from, you don't know what you don't know.

Over two-thirds of all the landbirds that breed in temperate North America, for example, migrate long distances to nonbreeding areas in Mexico, Central and South America and the islands of the Caribbean (Keast and Morton 1980, Rappole 1995).

That's it??!!

Not quite. Another reference, from the University of Florida paper titled " The potential for applying current research techniques on migratory bird biology in South America" http://www.zoo.ufl.edu/ajahn/applying%20tech1.htm , states:

Ironically, very little information exists on the migratory strategies of virtually any of the migratory bird species on the continent that is home to the world’s richest avifauna, South America. This condition exists in spite of the fact that austral migration, in which migration occurs between temperate and tropical South America, is one of the major avian migratory systems in the world and the largest in the Southern Hemisphere (Chesser 1994). With unique habitats, topographies and rapidly growing environmental alteration by humans, potential threats unique to South American migrants which depend on a range of resources across wide ranges throughout the year, may be significant.

Okay, let's review. We know we currently have low-path bird flu (H5N2) in the Dominican republic. We also know that there is a lax approach taken to poultry management and poultry health in Mexico, and other places in the Americas. We also know there is a real lack of hard data on where migratory birds go when they venture South of the Equator. We also know that things have a way of coming up from Down There, namely killer bees, dengue fever (see my latest post on dengue), and other maladies also venture up from the Americas all the time. Here's the latest: Suddenly, yellow fever is back on the list of things Brazilians are worrying about (see “Millions in Brazil seek shots in yellow fever scare” http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSN15407443  with a hat-tip to Slawdog..

These lessons, apparently, have not been lost on the US government, which for some strange reason seems to be actually reading these articles and acting upon them! From last week:

Bird flu: US/Chile coordinate detection in Tierra del

Fuego

Computerworld magazine does a fine job of keeping pandemic preparedness on the minds of Chief Information Officers (that's Head Geek of corporate and government IT-dom), as well as decision-makers and IT personnel.

Anyway, in their latest issue appears this gem of a story:

Eight-day IT outage would cripple most companies

Gartner survey finds business continuity plans lack ability to withstand longer outages

January 10, 2008 (Computerworld) -- A Gartner Inc. poll of information security and risk management professionals released today shows that most business continuity plans could not withstand a regional disaster because they are built to overcome severe outages lasting only up to seven days.

Gartner analyst Roberta Witty said that the results of the poll show that organizations must "mature" their business continuity and disaster recovery strategies to enable IT operations and staffers to endure outages of at least 30 days. Such efforts would require additional IT budget spending and collaboration across enterprise business units at most corporations, she noted.

Gartner surveyed 359 IT professionals from the U.S., U.K. and Canada during 2007 on their business continuity efforts, and nearly 60% said that their business continuity plans are limited to outages of seven days or less.

Further, results showed most companies focus on rebounding from internal IT disruptions, not from regional disasters that could also damage facilities. A very shortsighted tactic, remarked Witty, considering damage caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, as well as potential harm from outages, terrorist attacks, pandemics, service provider outages, civil unrest or other unpredictable event.

"If you start looking at some of the events we've [experienced] over the last few years, companies must plan for events that actually take much longer to recover from," Witty said. "This is an issue [businesses] have to deal with -- it's in front of everyone's face right now." 

The survey found that 77% of companies have come up with a business continuity plan covering power outages caused by fire, while 72% have a plan to get up and running after a natural disaster. Only 50% of companies are prepared to rebound from terrorism-related IT outages.

Witty did say that companies are starting to take pandemic concerns more seriously than in the past. The survey showed that 29% of organizations now have pandemic recovery measures in place, up from just 8% in 2005.

To withstand an outage of up to 30 days, companies must improve cross-training efforts and streamline emergency management, notification and incident management techniques for quicker response, she added. "That's what [business continuity] is about. If you don't have people to manage it, a data center is useless," Witty remarked.

I lectured on pandemic preparedness at Gartner's international conference in Orlando in 2006, and I know Ken McGee of Gartner, who (along with yours truly, of course) is one of the few recognized bona fide IT pandemic experts on the planet.  So Gartner is extremely well-focused on this topic.  Their research on this, and other topics, is first-rate.  It's "take it to the bank"-type material.

So when Gartner says sixty percent of American corporate and government organizations cannot sustain disaster recovery services beyond seven days, believe it.  And that is extremely bad news for any calamity, be it caused by a virus or a match.

Let me take you through the world of telecommuting plans.  They all originate in large data centers -- operations centers with floor tiles raised over twelve inches from the floor to accept conduits full of cables and cooling pipes and to keep equipment high and dry if those pipes burst and water seeps in.  They are also very chilly, so they can keep the multitudes of computers cool and, thus, more efficient.  (Heat is the enemy of computers, which is why you should blow out all computers thoroughly with canned air at least once a year.)  These data centers are also stuffed with what we call remote-access servers.  These servers are powered by UNIX, or Linux, or Microsoft Server products.  They run Windows Terminal Services, or Citrix, or some other emulation software.  And they need lots and lots and lots of bandwidth and processor power and energy.

And the stuff in data centers breaks sometimes.  Computers are machines, too, like the washer. Anything from a poorly-seated accessory card to a botched software patch can render a million dollars' worth of remote access equipment unusable.  That, in turn, requires hands-on work to fix.  You can't fix a physically broken appliance remotely, even if it is a computer.  You occasionally, sometimes frequently, need to take the machine physically down and get into it up to your elbows.  That takes people, people.  And if you are down 30% to 40% on your server team staff, you are in deep trouble.

Now the remote-access packets of data pass through the network; banks of appliances called routers and switches, any of which can break, for the same reasons as above.  Then after this leaves your organization's firewall (another appliance), you have to rely upon the Internet, and the same dynamics apply to all the equipment that runs the Internet.  Finally, you get to your PC or laptop, maybe in a hotel in Burbank, or your home in Tuscaloosa.  So if your cable/DSL modem is working properly, AND if you can get to the Internet, AND you can get back to your hosting data center, AND that remote equipment is running, AND you can log in to your validation server:  Well, that's a huge bunch of "ifs", even on a good day.  The fact this stuff even works most of the time is a huge testament to IT everywhere.  So hug a geek today!

This applies to all the participants in the work-at-home food chain:  The organization, the IT service provider, the telecommunications provider, all the way to the electric company.  If any of these links fails (and it will in a pandemic), the entire chain is worthless.  That is why corporations and governments alike must prepare to make the calls to bring people back into their offices when the Internet becomes unreliable.

That is also why these same organizations must undertake measures NOW to acquire masks, gloves, hand sanitizer and disinfectant wipes.  But that is a lesson left for another day.

The biggest concern after staff shortages and broken stuff is the issue of supply chain failures.  The Just-in-time supply chain, as we all know and preach, is lethally exposed during a pandemic.  During the runup to Y2K, we drilled incessantly in Florida for supply chain failures.  We even went so far as to have the National Guard ready to escort convoys of Winn-Dixie food from warehouses in Alabama to their distribution points within Florida's Panhandle. 

In a pandemic, everything will be constrained and in short supply.  This especially means spare parts and replacement equipment for IT, since so much of it comes from overseas (Asia).  It is difficult to get some networking equipment delivered quickly on a good day, let alone in the middle of an influenza pandemic.  In fact, Michael Dell told me personally in 2006 that the SARS experience has fueled Dell's initiative to try and develop a Singapore-to-Ireland revolving door of manufacturing during a pandemic.  The theory is that while one area is savaged, the other might be on the path to recovery.  The company is making the best assumption it can; namely, that it must find a way to continue operations, or perish.  Dell will also try and maintain larger inventories of certain parts, although those components change so quickly that it is an egregious violation of Dell's own business model to store anything in too much quantity for too long.

It might surprise some to know that Dell has taken such a proactive approach to pandemic planning.  But I know Dell to be a forward-thinking and forward-leaning corporation, so it is not surprising to see them adopt such an approach.  The problem is that Dell is so alone when it comes to such planning.  And this is reinforced by Gartner's latest study, which again reinforces the limitless, ignorant arrogance of people -- including IT people and their superiors, regrettably -- to think a calamity will never happen to them.

Lower Manhattan and New Orleans professionals know the tremendous impact an extended calamity can cause.  That is why companies such as Merrill Lynch are global Best Practices at disaster recovery.  There's nothing like experience to help shape attitudes. 

The global press is fawning over today's bird flu-related statements of Bernard Vallat, head of the World Organization for Animal Health, or OIE.  Here is the MSNBC story, culled from, among other sources, Reuters and AP:

Were bird flu fears overblown?

PARIS - Fears of a flu pandemic originating from the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus were overblown, the head of the World Organization for Animal Health said Thursday.

The Paris-based body — an intergovernmental organization responsible for improving animal health worldwide — has been at the forefront of global efforts to monitor and fight H5N1, which scientists have tracked because they fear it may mutate into a human flu virus that starts a pandemic.

But "the risk was overestimated," said Bernard Vallat, director general of the animal health organization, also known as the OIE.

Vallat said the H5N1 virus has proved extremely stable, despite concerns that it could mutate into a form that could spread easily among humans.

"We have never seen such a stable strain," Vallat said.

He said concerns a few years ago that a flu pandemic from H5N1 might be imminent lacked scientific proof.

"It was just nonscientific supposition," he told reporters.

Prepare for pandemic
At the same time, the United Nations influenza coordinator said that governments around the world need to do more to prepare for the dramatic economic impact of the next flu pandemic.

On Thursday David Nabarro said his team had recently collected information from nearly 150 countries to see how prepared they were for a pandemic and the picture was mixed.

“Most countries have now focused on pandemic as a potential cause of catastrophe and have done some planning. But the quality of the plans is patchy and too few of them pay attention to economic and social consequences,” he told BBC radio.

“The economic consequences could be up to $2 trillion -- up to 5 percent of global GDP removed,” he said, reiterating previous World Bank and UN estimates.

Nabarro will deliver a lecture at the London School of Economics later on Thursday on the global state of preparedness for any pandemic.

Father infected by son
Separately, a Chinese man who died of bird flu last month likely passed the disease on to his father, but there is no evidence the virus mutated into a form which can be easily passed between humans, an official said Thursday.

The man in the eastern province of Jiangsu was diagnosed with the H5N1 strain of bird flu days after his 24-year-old son died from the disease.

This rare case of two family members struck by the disease drew concern from health authorities, because humans almost always contract H5N1 from infected birds.

H5N1 has infected more than 340 people and killed at least 212 since 2003, mostly in Asia. The virus strain does not easily spread between people, however, and most patients had been infected through close contact with sick poultry.

With the world’s biggest poultry population and millions of backyard birds, China is at the centre of the fight against bird flu. There have been other cases of human infection without confirmed outbreaks among birds in the same area.

The latest cases in China brought the number of confirmed human infections of bird flu in China to 27, with 17 deaths.

'Always be a risk'
While playing down concerns of a pandemic, Vallat said bird flu "will always be a risk" — not just H5N1, but also other strains that could mutate and become more virulent for animals.

He said vaccination campaigns were needed in countries where H5N1 has become endemic, including Indonesia, Egypt and, to a lesser extent, Nigeria.

Risks from H5N1 would be "greatly diminished" if the virus were eradicated in these countries, which have become "reservoirs" for bird flu, he said.

The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22590623/

An AFP wire story expands somewhat on Monsieur Vallat's comments:

H5N1 bird flu virus reassuringly stable: animal health chief

PARIS (AFP) — The H5N1 virus that causes deadly avian flu has proven remarkably stable and action to curb outbreaks of the disease are highly effective, the head of the world's paramount agency for animal health said here Thursday.

Since the end of 2003, mutation of the H5N1 virus so that it can be easily transmissible among humans has been a nightmare for the world health community, raising concerns of a global influenza pandemic that could claim tens of millions of lives.

But Bernard Vallat, director general of the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE), said no evidence of any such genetic shift had emerged.

"We have never seen a virus which has been so stable for so long. Compared to other viruses, it is extremely stable, which minimises the risk of mutation" into a pandemic strain, he told reporters.

Vallat said a system to beef up veterinary surveillance, especially in poor countries, had borne fruit, enabling outbreaks of H5N1 in poultry flocks to be identified and swiftly eradicated.

"It took two years for our voice to be heard," Vallat said. "If we had been heard before, the virus would have been stopped in its tracks."

Vallat said, though, "there are three countries, Indonesia, Egypt and to a lesser degree Nigeria, where the disease is endemic, and this creates reservoirs from which it can bounce back."

"If we could eradicate the virus in those countries, the problem of a pandemic from Asian H5N1 would be resolved," said Vallat.

The H5N1 virus is lethal and extremely contagious among birds. It is also dangerous for humans who are in close proximity to sick poultry, who can pick up the virus through nasal droplets or faeces.

H5N1 has killed 216 people since 2003, principally in Asia, according to the latest toll posted by the World Health Organisation (WHO). Hundreds of millions of chickens, ducks and geese have died from the virus or been culled as a preventative measure.

In other comments, Vallat said that climate change, combined with the acceleration of cross-border trade under globalisation, was posing a growing threat to animal health, which in turn raised a challenge for human health.

He pointed to mosquito-borne diseases such as West Nile virus, which has become established in North America, and Rift Valley fever, which is edging northwards in Africa "and could quite easily become established in the Mediterranean."

In other comments, Vallat said the OIE was in talks with Beijing over opening a reference laboratory -- an internationally validated lab for checking samples -- in China as part of the global surveillance network for monitoring animal health.

At present, the only OIE-accredited reference labs in Asia are in Japan, but the agency is pushing hard to have these vital facilities much closer to the outbreaks of disease.

China's participation in the 172-member OIE had been dogged for 15 years over the participation of Taiwan, but the row was resolved last May.

Three Chinese labs have been put forward as reference facilities, Vallat said.

Vallat said that consumption of meat would probably rise by 50 percent by 2020 to respond to the needs of the burgeoning middle classes in Asia, and this required stronger veterinary safeguards to prevent further health scares.

http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5jpPvXJJ3VTHifJCBo7w3zW8DCzsQ

In related news, pigs were seen flying alongside migratory wildfowl; billions of chickens worldwide began clucking in gratitude; and mute swans in England were actually heard talking with cockney accents.

I don't know how often the OIE talks with the UN's FAO and WHO.  But judging from Monsieur Vallat's comments, they apparently don't talk enough.  Risk communication as it relates to pandemic preparedness is a tricky thing.  But the experts all agree that transparency and consistency are two extremely important concepts to adhere to.  For a leader of a global organization to make summary statements about the virulence and pandemic potential of a virus without first double-checking his data is reckless and not befitting someone of his stature.

The damage Monsieur Vallat's comments has caused to the pandemic preparedness effort worldwide cannot yet be calculated.  Perhaps the damage can be assessed later, in terms of lost human lives and poultry.  But for now, we are left with a sense of bewilderment and, quite honestly, some sense of betrayal.

Let's look at Vallat's quote again:

"We have never seen a virus which has been so stable for so long. Compared to other viruses, it is extremely stable, which minimises the risk of mutation" into a pandemic strain, he told reporters.

I have always been told that H5N1 is a mutating fool of a virus.  In four years, four distinct clades have emerged, with many subclades and mutations in abundance.  How any expert can call any influenza A virus "exceptionally stable" is beyond my comprehension, let alone H5N1. 

I have asked my expert friends for comment.  I will post them when they are available.  And it is important for the WHO and FAO to answer Vallat's comments, lest their entire bird flu eradication effort unravels.  So too, our combined efforts at preparing our leaders and decision-makers for a pandemic.  It is time to answer, and answer in unison.  But the scientists and the policy makers must pick up the gauntlet thrown down by the comments of one Monsieur Bernard Vallat.

By the way:  Judging from the abundance of photos of Monsieur Vallat on the OIE Website, it can be determined that the most dangerous airspace in all Paris is the distance between Vallat and a camera lens.

Just a quick note on the eventual demise of the HD-DVD format.  As you probably know, the high definition DVD market is plagued with two competing and non-compatible formats:  Toshiba's HD-DVD, and Sony's Blu-Ray.  HD-DVD is unbelievable, and Blu-Ray is equally awe-inspiring.  The technology basically allows a thinner, more precise laser beam to put many times more information onto a DVD disc.  Thus, you can get much richer video (more information stored on disc) and, in an increasing number of films, uncompressed audio.  I own a Blu-Ray player and HDTV courtesy of my wife (well, we gave each other the stuff for Christmas), and this has directly affected my ability to churn out quality blogs in real time!  In other words, I find myself sitting on my behind more often, watching things like "3:10 to Yuma" or "2001: A Space Odyssey" in Blu-Ray with my mouth and eyes wide open, amazed that I finally have motion picture quality exceeding that of a movie theatre in my own home.

But I digress.  Sony, hurt badly several times by losses incurred (both moral and financial) due to bad strategery with formats in the past (recall the VHS vs. beta battle in the 1980s and other, more recent A/V muckups), wised up this time and got in step with their usual competitor, Philips.  Thus was Blu-Ray DVD born, and the format is truly spectacular.  Sony also lined up five major motion picture studios to back the product.

In contrast, Toshiba lined up Paramount and Universal to support HD-DVD.  Universal was HD-DVD-specific.Paramount had been making hi-def DVDs in both formats, but last year decided to move to HD-DVD exclusively. 

Bad decision. 

Warner Brothers, whose films account for about 20% of all titles, had also been licensing in both formats.  But, due in no small part to what they see as an inevitable recession with resulting timidity in the buying public, along with a recognition of superior marketing by Blu-Ray, announced several days ago that WB would be Blu-Ray-specific by mid-2008.  This announcement was quickly followed by two business partners, New Line Cinema and HBO Films.

Universal's exclusive HD-DVD contract with Toshiba expired on New Years Day.  It is anticipated that Universal will also jump on board the Blu-Ray bandwagon sometime this year and start releasing films in the format.

So here's what you can look for:

A long, slow roll to oblivion for HD-DVD.  Dropping prices, coupled with frantic efforts to lure smaller boutique studios to their format.  Probably won't happen, since those smaller studios desperately need cash, and Blu-Ray is the ticket.  Also look for better and better bundles from HD-DVD and Toshiba.

Meanwhile, Sony is in the process of licensing Blu-Ray technology to more and more manufacturers (something they did NOT do in the VHS-Beta war).  This will allow more players, which will cut prices, which will increase demand for movies in Blu-Ray.

The Blu-Ray Disc (BD) marketing people are also now smelling blood, and moving in for the kill with great sales and specials on titles.  For example, Amazon has been running a buy one, get one free BD special on selected titles, and offering huge price cuts on BD discs as well.  Best Buy has been selling AFI classics like Goodfellas and Deliverance for $14.99 on BD, and has been running its own Buy One, get One Free Blu-Ray specials online.

This, in turn, will put even more pressure on Toshiba to reduce prices.  But the tide has officially turned, and unless Toshiba can come up with a huge innovation, or make HD-DVD movies as cheap to buy as standard DVD, the format is doomed. 

But do not wait until then to get on the bandwagon for Blu-Ray.  The format is so impressive, you are truly  doing your eyes and ears a disservice by NOT moving to high-def now, today, absolutely this minute!  I use two Websites to evaluate the auality of individual Blu-ray discs:  http://www.blu-ray.com/ and http://bluray.highdefdigest.com/ .  If a disc gets reviews for quality of video and audio with both of these sites' reviewers, I get the disc.  That is not to say I would go out and splurge $30 on a Blu-Ray of Superbad, for example.  But if I thought "McLovin" would be any funnier in HD, I might be tempted.

So get out there and move to Blu-Ray with confidence that your butt will be completely numb for months to come.  Eye and ear candy of the highest magnitude.