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Script details start to leak for World War Z film

Trust me, this post is of interest to influenza and disease fans.

No doubt about it, I am a sucker for zombie flicks.  Even mention a new zombie movie, and I will probably check it out.  To me, nothing says "apocalypse" like the vision of hordes of the undead, feasting on human flesh.  And, up until recently, no one did a zombie story for film better than George A. Romero. 

I had the great opportunity to meet George Romero in 1978 (or was it 1979?), right after his classic Dawn of the Dead was released. He was lecturing at Florida Atlantic University and I was still living in South Florida, so I made the drive to Boca Raton and sat through his extremely entertaining lecture.  I was very familiar with his films Night of the Living Dead and The Crazies, as well as Dawn, and I asked him how he came to make all his male protagonists black.  He shrugged and said he wasn't quite sure, but I thought it confirmed Romero's keen eye for social comment.

But I digress.  Hollywood finally "found" Romero, and as his budgets grew, his edge wore down a bit, just like when your favorite starving artist/musician finds commercial success.  Sure, the albums sound fine, but the edge is gone.  Now I have not seen Diary of the Dead, but Romero's previous two zombie flicks were a bit stale.  And zombiedom in general was in dire need of reinvention and waited for that catalyst.

Lo and behold, that catalyst took form and substance, courtesy of Max Brooks.  The son of Mel Brooks and the late Anne Bancroft, Max burst upon the zombie scene with his Zombie Survival Guide, the definitive way to stay alive when the unburied dead start to rise again.  An unqualified runaway success, the Guide is in its umpteenth printing and is readily available at local bookstores.

But Max was not content to just write one novel.   He followed up that success with a book that is one of the most entertaining and horrifying books I have ever read, World War Z:  An Oral History of the Zombie War.  Set ten years after the official conclusion of the war, Max is the writer commissioned by the UN to get the real story on the war, the initial outbreak of the virus in rural China, the official government denials, and how the zombie plague spread to the whole world.

The result of that report should be of great interest to readers of this Blog, as well as followers of diseases, pandemics and geopolitics.  I geniunely do not want to spoil the experience for you, so let me just say that the origins of the plague and the methods used to spread it will ring familiar to most.  Brooks still manages to come up with a few things we have never thought of yet!  Also familiar to flubies will be the government foot-dragging, denials and underestimation of the nature and impact of the plague.

World War Z is a gripping read, with equal parts Tom Clancy and George A. Romero (Max makes no bones about his affinity for Romero, and he dedicates the book, in part, to him. The photo at left is of Brooks interviewing Romero at Comic-Con 2007).  The book, while epic in scope, moves swiftly and in a very readable, very satisfying way.  Brooks' character moves from nation to nation, across the entire planet, interviewing survivors and documenting horrifying story after horrifying story.  Each story is entirely plausible, if you buy the initial premise that the dead are rising and dining on the living.

World War Z was being optioned even before the hardcover went on sale, which was not surprising considering the subject matter, the best-selling success of Guide and the name Brooks.  Father Mel had even taken to the talk show circuit and airwaves to promote Guide, which makes one long to hear those interviews!  "Oy, those zombies hocken me ha'chinik!"

Suddenly and quite happily for the Brooks family, Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt started bidding against each other for the film rights to World War Z.   DiCaprio's Appian Way Productions (partnered with Warner Brothers) fought Pitt's Plan B company (aligned with Paramount).  Brad Pitt decided that a major, big-budget zombie flick would make lotsa moola and coughed up the funds to buy the film rights.  Warners, meanwhile, redeployed its zombie strategery and sewed up "300" and "Dawn of the Dead" remaker Zack Snyder for a film called Army of the Dead.  So both studios get high-profile zombie flicks for their future 2009-2010 release schedules.

Now back to Z.  The first thing Plan B did was to hire veteran scriptwriter, Marvel Comics writer and Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski to fashion a screenplay.  Straczynski had just adapted the book The Changeling for Clint Eastwood (!) and was available to write Z.  The script itself was completed before the Writers Strike and was delivered to Plan B at year's end.  That script has now somehow been leaked to a couple of movie fan Websites, and by all accounts it is quite impressive.  Fans of Joe (as I hear he likes to be called) Straczynski should not expect anything less than greatness.  It is being compared to such excellent cinema as Children of Men and Zodiac, and is leaving those who have read the script longing for directors such as David Fincher, Alphonso Cuaron or even Peter Jackson or Spielberg!  After you have read World War Z, you will understand why:  It is an epic work, spanning continents and leaving one with disturbing images that will stay with you for many weeks afterward.

Some are speculating that the script is of sufficient magnitude, depth and quality that Pitt himself might be cast in the title role.  No doubt that Max Brooks, a handsome lad himself (photo at left), would be satisfied.

Have you noticed the sheer number of big-budget plague-related films in the past few years?  Started by the British classic 28 Days Later, and now including Invasion (a viral, updated remake of Body Snatchers), I Am Legend, the flu pandemic reference in Children of Men, the British virus movie Doomsday, and the soon-to-be-released M. Night Shyamalan thriller The Happening, it could be debated that Hollywood may actually be doing a better job of mentally preparing people for an eventual pandemic than the government.  Consider the pandemic-related bonus supplements on the I Am Legend and The Invasion DVDs (Invasion's features none other than Mike Davis, author of The Monster at Our Door).

And then wait in breathless anticipation.  Because we ain't seen nothin' yet. 

A sad day indeed.  Jericho, the groundbreaking CBS serial drama whose cancellation last May inspired the largest outpouring of fan outrage in television history, has gotten cancelled yet again.  This time, I fear, the cancellation will stick.  The reason:  Just not enough Nielsen viewers to justify the resumption of the series.

The producers of Jericho, at the urging of CBS, filmed two endings:  One in case the show was picked up again, and one in case the show was again cancelled.  It is easy to figure out which version will air tonight.

While there is rumored to be some wiggle room in the finale for a segue to a cable network, the show's high production values and accompanying high per-episode costs are probably too high for anyone but HBO or Showtime.  Come to think of it, Showtime, with its CBS link, would be a nice place for Jericho to land.  So would USA.  So would the Sci-Fi Channel.  I would settle for Lifetime if it picked up the show and ran with it!

While we hate to see the program end, I do want to acknowledge CBS's commitment to bring the show back and bring the series to a conclusion without leaving viewers in the lurch.  Closure is rare in television.  The best closure example anyone will ever think of was the last Newhart episode.  So off we go tonight at 10PM EDT to see which version of America wins the post-terrorist-nuke civil war/revolution.

Some Jericho trivia:  At the beginning of each episode, you hear Morse code.  Only practitioners of this almost-lost art recognized that the code changed with each episode.  And the messages were designed to help the viewer figure out a puzzle regarding the main story line.  That is the attention to detail, and the respect for the fans, that Jericho's producers gave us.   All in all, quite a gift and quite a ride.

My last wish is that the Jericho Season Two DVD boxed set is reworked with deleted scenes and maybe some lost footage sufficient to create a backstory, in order to stretch the running time and, therefore, the satisfying viewing experience that was Jericho. 

Nuts.

Have you noticed the sudden increase in stories related to avian influenza?   The New York Times has published no fewer than three pieces on bird flu in the past three days, including what is happening down in Indonesia.  The Times has covered a medical ethics piece on ventilator triage that is welcome news to all of us who have been preaching that gospel for years. 

A report that I picked up in today's Orando Sentinel is also interesting.  There are precious few Spanish Flu survivors left in the world.  Like World War II veterans, they are dying by the thousands each and evey day.  Soon, there will be no 1918 pandemic survivors left. 

So it is important for us to hear their stories and listen to their grief -- now almost a hundred years old -- and hear their pain, their anguish, their daily horror.   I have mentioned that the United States (and the rest of the world, for that matter) experienced something akin to collective post-traumatic stress disorder from the 1918-1919 flu pandemic, and then experienced a lingering sense of doom with the appearance of Encephalitis Lethargica, a byproduct of the Spanish Flu. 

Read this article slowly.  Do not merely scan it with your eyes.  Take in each and every word of 96-year old Lora Miller.  Then, read the New York Times piece on ventilator rationing and imagine the psychosocial impact such triage will have on American souls.  Then go find someone who scoffs at the idea of preparedness, have them look you square in the eyes and tell you we don't need to prepare for a flu pandemic. Better yet, have them look into Lora Miller's eyes and tell her the same thing.  If they can.

Killer flu: It's a disaster in the making

Are we ready for another influenza pandemic? Experts say no -- but such a calamity is overdue.

Robert McDonald

Columbia News Service

March 25, 2008

It began with a cough. Then came the sniffles, and then a terrible fever.

No one thought it was anything more than the flu. And, indeed, that's all it was. But the year was 1918, and this flu was one of the greatest killers mankind had ever known.

"I heard my father coughing, and I had never heard him the least bit sick before that," says Lora Miller, a 96-year-old Los Angles resident whose father was killed by the epidemic. "He passed away pretty fast. It was a terrible shock. He was so young and strong. I never got over it."

Ninety years after the deadliest flu swept through the world, scientists and health officials say that it could happen again. Not only is the planet overdue for another flu pandemic, scientists say, the United States is due for an influenza virus as bad or worse than the flu that killed more than 500,000 Americans in 1918 and 1919. Experts believe that if a similar pandemic struck again, with modern transportation moving unwittingly infected people quickly around the world, millions of Americans could die.

The federal government has made great strides in preparing for a pandemic -- global virus surveillance has been beefed up, flu vaccine and anti-viral supplies expanded and detailed plans created to deal with a society in crisis. The problem is that no knows how much these efforts will actually help slow down a killer virus.

The pandemic of 1918 and 1919, known as the Spanish flu because it was erroneously thought to have come from Spain, was an unusual killer. Unlike conventional flu viruses, it killed the strong and the healthy, but passed over the old and the very young.

It killed an estimated 20 million to 50 million people worldwide. The disease killed more U.S. soldiers in WWI than were killed in combat.

"The clock is ticking, and we don't know if time's up," says Dr. Bruce Gellin, director of the National Vaccine Program Office at the Department of Health and Human Services. "A flu pandemic could happen at any time."

A flu pandemic is an outbreak of a new type of influenza A virus that spreads throughout the world. Influenza A is a variant of the deadliest type of flu.

Historically, there have been flu pandemics every 30 to 35 years, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The Asian flu of 1957-58 killed 70,000 Americans, and the Hong Kong flu of 1968-69 killed 34,000.

The 1918 flu killed so many because it occurred at the end of WWI when millions of soldiers were crammed together in battlefields and camps worldwide before returning home. Now, with airplanes bringing people from one side of the world to the other in a matter of hours instead of weeks, officials worry that a pandemic could be far more deadly.

"With modern transportation, a flu pandemic could spread faster than any time in history," says Richard Thompson, spokesman for the World Health Organization. "The death toll would be between 4 to 40 million deaths."

The current flu vaccine would be ineffective against a new flu virus because it was created to fight a conventional flu. It would take months to develop a vaccine to combat a new killer-flu virus, experts said. A pandemic would be well under way before a vaccine would be ready.

Scientists are worried about avian influenza, which has decimated bird populations in southeast Asia in the past 10 years. Pandemic flu viruses are believed to originate from bird or swine viruses that mutate and transfer to humans. So far, the only way humans can catch bird flu is from birds. If the avian virus mutates so that it can spread by human-to-human contact, it could easily become a pandemic flu virus, experts say.

Miller says she dreads to see the effect a flu pandemic would have on society.

She thinks that people in 1918 could handle a disaster like the Spanish flu because they saw death far more often; infant mortality was still high, and the war had killed and maimed millions in Europe.

She is not sure that Americans could handle seeing hundreds of thousands or millions of people dying in just a few months.

"The world doesn't know fear and fright anymore," Miller says. "You won't want to leave your house. I pray every day that it doesn't come back. Every day."  (bold mine)

Copyright © 2008, Orlando Sentinel

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/features/lifestyle/orl-flupandemic08mar25,0,1859578.story

The New York Times

March 25, 2008

Guidelines for Epidemics: Who Gets a Ventilator?

By CORNELIA DEAN

It may sound unthinkable — the idea of denying life support to some people in a public health disaster like an epidemic. But a new report says doctors, health care workers and the public need to start thinking about it.

The report, by New York State health officials, grows out of the work of a group formed in 2006 to plan for the possibility of an influenza pandemic. The group focused on the breathing machines called ventilators.

Right now, there are enough ventilators to go around. But in an epidemic, there could be a severe shortage of machines and, more important, doctors and nurses to run them. At that point, the new report says, doctors and hospitals would have no choice but to start taking some people off the machines so that others could live.

Removal “is absolutely the crux of the problem,” said a lead author of the study, Dr. Tia Powell, who has spent much of her career studying medical ethics. “There are people who might survive who won’t get a chance at a ventilator if someone who is likely to die even with a vent is using it.”

Before an epidemic strikes, the report says, the public should confront the issue to ensure that any such triage decisions reflect community views, as well as ethical and clinical standards.

“It’s not really a technical solution,” said Dr. Powell, who directs the New York State Task Force on Life and the Law. “It’s values. And the people are the experts on that.”

The report, “Allocation of Ventilators in a Public Health Disaster,” appears in the March issue of Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness, a quarterly journal of the American Medical Association.

The project began in response to outbreaks of bird or avian flu, H5N1 influenza, in Asia. Although just a few hundred people are known to have contracted the disease so far, most of them died of it. So a widespread outbreak would overwhelmingly strain the health care system, not just in machinery, but also in the doctors, nurses and other health care personnel needed to use it.

The report says triage, separating those who will receive treatment from those who will not, should largely depend on the prognosis for recovery, not on factors like underlying health or age.

“We are not interested in quality of life,” Dr. Powell said in an interview. “We are just interested in whether you are able to survive this particular crisis.”

Anyway, she said, age has not been “a particularly sensitive discriminator for survival” in H5N1 flu. Many of its victims have been young.

Though allocating scarce resources is a perennial topic among ethicists and health officials, the authors say their guidelines are the first of their kind in the nation and could be a template for rationing in other catastrophes.

“This kind of thinking, as scary or even horrifying as it may seem, is absolutely critical and is much better done now than on the fly in the middle of a pandemic,” said Dr. Art Kellerman of Emory University, an expert on emergency medicine.

Dr. Kellerman, who was not connected to the study, said that a crisis like a flu pandemic was a matter of when, not if, and that he was “frustrated with people who want to pretend that it won’t be an issue or simply pass the buck to the emergency care physician.”

The guidelines confront that issue explicitly, recommending the appointment of “triage officers” to make ventilator decisions based on information about the number of incoming patients and their conditions, but who will not be involved in caring for them. If doctors and nurses caring for the sick must also make these triage decisions, the report says, the resulting stress can be “corrosive.”

Under the guidelines, “the person who is providing your direct care is not going to be the person who decides whether you stay on the vent or go off,” Dr. Powell said. “You need to know they are advocating for you. They cannot be looking out the door at how many people are waiting for care.”

Dr. Powell noted that rationing — or as she said it is called, “providing alternative standards of care” — was repellent to many Americans. In the early days of kidney dialysis, when dialysis machines were scare, “we were so uncomfortable with that as a nation we essentially made dialysis available to everyone who needs it,” she said. Similarly, she said, much effort has gone into building a fair system for allocating organs for transplant.

But that work “does not really apply to this kind of crisis situation,” she said. “This is a genuine emergency. You are not going to have time to do a careful sorting out, by list.”

So the panel began work by identifying crucial factors for rationing, including these:

• Recognizing that patients deprived of mechanical breathing assistance should continue to receive care.
• Using scarce resources like mechanical ventilators to save the greatest number of lives while continuing to care for patients individually. “As the number of affected patients multiplies, accommodating these two goals will require making increasingly difficult decisions,” the report says.
• Planning, so as not to leave decisions in a pandemic “to exhausted frontline providers.” Public health agencies must accept this obligation, the report says, “despite the difficulties inherent in planning.”
• Applying any plan broadly and consistently.
• Publicizing guidelines, seeking public comments and incorporating suggested revisions.

For ventilators, the group established “exclusion criteria,” conditions that would classify people ineligible for ventilators. It includes recurrent cardiac arrest, metastatic cancer with a poor prognosis, severe burns, end-stage organ failure and neurological conditions with high expected mortality.

The report cites “much public comment” about whether it would be better to emphasize ventilator access for children rather than the elderly. And it lists kidney failure as a reason to withhold ventilator support, in part because patients needing dialysis already place increased demand on scarce nursing resources.

When a ventilator is removed from a patient who depends on it, the report says, health workers should follow their institutions’ existing guidelines for withdrawing life support and provide palliative care like sedation, so patients do not experience “air hunger.” In an epidemic, the report adds, “facilities should prepare for a significant increase in demand for palliative care.”

The guidelines are online at http://www.health.state.ny.us/diseases/communicable/influenza/pandemic/ventilators/.

Dr. Powell said she had discussed them at meetings of professional societies and at medical centers around the state and added that she hoped the new report would draw more public attention. One likely step, she said, would be to hold discussions by focus groups.

“The guidelines are intended to reflect the values of New Yorkers,” she said. “And if they don’t, we want advice on how to revise them.”

Dr. Kellerman of Emory said the report should not be allowed to gather dust. “It is important that those guidelines be out there and discussed and struggled with right now,” he said.

Many hospitals already struggle with chronically scarce resources like intensive care beds, he said, and in a pandemic the problem would be far, far worse.

Dr. Kellerman said he was not optimistic. In the first place, he said, the public tends to “tune out” on such disturbing questions. Or, he said, they may accept the guidelines only “until it’s their family member. Then people often feel very differently.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/25/health/25vent.html?ref=science

The triage story reminded me of an email I sent to then-governor Jeb Bush in the autumn of 2006.  Readers of this Blog know that Jeb is a longtime friend of mine, and I served him in several capacities during his two terms as governor of Florida.  I sent Jeb a pandemic vaccine story in '06 and asked him the rhetorical question:

"Do you vaccinate your future, or your past?"

No doubt, he was relieved he did not have to make that decision.  That is a question not to be brushed off or taken lightly.  The decisions on who to save and who not to save will be made all over our nation the next time a killer flu strikes.  Many (and I would hazard most) current pandemic plans do not account for what age group will be stricken and what age group should get priority treatment.  The last time I saw Florida's panflu plan, for example, it did not address the issue of triage by age, or vaccination by age.  It just called for treating the sick and vaccinating the most vulnerable; namely, the elderly and small children.

But believe it or not, there are much, much larger issues at stake in a pandemic.  Let's consider H5N1 as the pandemic strain.  We already know that in its current state, H5N1 kills the young in far greater percentages than the old.  If H5N1 or another influenza exhibited the same propensity for killing the young in large numbers, what fate shall befall the Republic?  In other words, do we vaccinate our future or our past?  I say we vaccinate our future first.  After the first responder community, we vaccinate young adults, then the younger, then the rest.

The Feds say that an influenza pandemic comparable to 1918's will cause more than 2.5 million estimated American deaths.  By their numbers, and factoring in 1918's statistics for killing young adults (roughly half), an influenza pandemic could kill as many as a million Americans between ages 18 and 40. Considering H5N1's track record, it could even begin to wipe out people under 18 in even greater numbers.  Now look at the cumulative lost wages and lost taxes from over one million productive young people who would no longer be with us. 

I think you can see where I am going. Today, there are already fewer Americans than we need to maintain the current federal budget.   The Comptroller of the Currency says that if left unabated, by 2042 the entire Federal budget will be consumed by entitlement spending.  That is because Boomers such as myself will be retiring in greater and greater numbers, with fewer young people behind us to pick up the financial slack.  If we triage in a pandemic based solely on who needs care, a severe pandemic could mean the total bankruptcy of the Union.  It could also mean that any surviving American youths would be working non-stop for the sole benefit of the entitlement class in this nation.  To prevent that last sentence from coming true, a pandemic would also very well mean a very liberal (and at that point, a very necessary) revamping of American immigration policy.  We will need people to replace the million-plus lost wage earners. 

It is estimated that the average life expectancy of the nation dropped anywhere from ten to twelve years in the aftermath of the 1918 pandemic.  That was a direct result of the loss of so many young people to the Spanish Flu as well as losses due to World War I.  Just keep in mind that more American soldiers died from the flu than died from combat in 1918 and 1919. 

I don't know if you agree with me, or not.  But these issues need to be discussed.  So we must listen to, and learn from, the voices from the past.  And then, we must make decisions as a nation that ensures we protect our future when we pass out antivirals, try to keep people alive with ventilators until the vaccine comes, and then jab people with vaccines.  We must think of our children and grandchildren. At any rate, whether you agree or disagree, the debate must come now, rather than on the fly, as said in the NYT piece: “This kind of thinking, as scary or even horrifying as it may seem, is absolutely critical and is much better done now than on the fly in the middle of a pandemic,” said Dr. Art Kellerman of Emory University, an expert on emergency medicine.

I'm not saying we need to make age the sole determinor of who lives and who dies.  But we need to decide on a balance, with an eye toward favoring the young whenever and wherever medically possible. 

I think Lora Miller would approve.

Indonesian government stops taking its meds, reverts to not sharing all bird flu samples

All this talk of Indonesia singing Kumbaya and sharing human H5N1 virus samples was, apparently, for naught.  Reuters is reporting that the Indonesian government has seemingly reversed its decision and will only share virus samples when they deem it appropriate -- or (my speculation entirely) until Bill Gates, who is slated to visit Indonesia in May, opens his foundation's considerable checkbook and helps bankroll vaccine if and when the pandemic comes.

This apparent change of direction is really not too different from what the Indonesians did last summer.  As you recall, Bali was hosting a huge global warming summit later that year, and they did not want it upstaged by world leaders contracting bird flu.  So, when Bali reported its multiple bird flu cases in humans, the Indonesian government sent virus samples to the WHO (see my blog "Dr. Chan, it's the Bali Chamber of Commerce calling..." , August 17, 2007).

So Indonesia will send samples only when they think it is appropriate.  We can take that to mean "only when they think the virus may have mutated."

As you may know, I blog on IT issues for industry insider magazine Computerworld.  I was asked to blog on Computerworld's Website for a number of reasons, especially because of my background in disaster recovery planning and my alleged expertise in pandemic planning for business and government.  I recently blogged on the situation in Indonesia for that universe of readers.  Please read the comment from a reader located in Indonesia, known as H&T, in response:

I live in bird flu central (Indonesia). My wife is Indonesian and hails from a rural background in east Java. Traveling in that part of the world I am struck by two things related to bird flu:

1) Everyone keeps chickens and ducks in their yard;
2) Almost no one has any inkling about bird flu or what precautions to take (almost everyone is a subsistence farmer with little access to or interest about information on global events and concerns).

Bird flu is almost certainly coming soon to a theatre near you. It will almost certainly "made in Indonesia" stamped on the side.

So we'll have to wait until the Indonesian government decides if a virus sample should be sent to the WHO.  It means that the Indonesian government will play "Stump the Band" with H5N1 and will send samples to the WHO if and only if their home-grown scientists cannot get the answers right and can convince the government to send them forward.

Well, that makes me feel warm all over.  How about you?

For the full Reuters story, see below,

Indonesia limits sharing of bird flu samples

Mon Mar 24, 2008 5:48pm IST

JAKARTA (Reuters) - Indonesia will not fully share bird flu virus samples with the World Health Organization until a new global mechanism is in place, a senior official said on Monday.

Indonesia is the nation worst hit by H5N1 avian influenza, with 129 human cases, of whom 105 have died.

Indonesia sent bird flu virus samples last month to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a WHO-collaborating laboratory, after a nearly 6-month hiatus when it won assurance that it would get access to affordable vaccines.

But Bayu Krisnamurthi, head of a national commission dealing with bird flu, said Indonesia would only send virus samples on a case-by-case basis until a new virus sharing mechanism currently being drawn up by the WHO took effect.

"The health ministry decides whether or not to send samples," he told a news conference on the sidelines of a meeting to step up the campaign against bird flu in the capital Jakarta and surrounding areas.

He declined to say under what circumstances the ministry would decide to send samples to a WHO collaborating laboratory.

Indonesia drew international concern when it defied protocol and refused to share its virus samples last year, saying it wanted guarantees from richer nations and drugmakers that poor countries would get access to affordable vaccines derived from their samples.

Talks hosted by the WHO last year in Geneva failed to reach an agreement on a new virus-sharing system, and the impasse only seemed to ease when Indonesia handed over samples last month.

The WHO says it has begun to disclose how and where samples it receives are used in response to poor countries' demands for more transparency.

The United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said last week Indonesian efforts have done little to control bird flu and the nation needed more help in controlling the virus.

Surveillance and response teams are working in 193 out of 448 districts in Indonesia, yet birds in 31 out of 33 provinces are affected, FAO Chief Veterinary Officer Joseph Domenech said.

Krisnamurthi said bird flu had cost Indonesia 4.1 trillion rupiah ($446.6 million) since cases in poultry were discovered in 2004, excluding the impact of job losses and reduced protein consumption among the population.

But he said there had not been evidence that the virus had mutated into a form that could jump easily between people.

The chief of Jakarta's animal husbandry department, Edy Setiarto, told the same news conference that he expected the city to be free of live poultry by 2010.

He said the current campaign to rid the capital of backyard poultry had faced problems because some residents had resisted.

(Reporting by Ahmad Pathoni; Editing by Ed Davies)

Someone at CBS gets it when it comes to the New Media.  And that may well save my current favorite show from cancellation again.

As you know, the groundbreaking series Jericho was raised from the dead by an Internet campaign that culminated in the president of CBS Entertainment being buried alive under some 40,000 pounds of nuts.  She dug herself out and renewed the series for a seven-episode run that has been airing since February.  But she warned the loyal viewers of the show:  Bring me more viewers or else the show gets it again.

Well, the ratings have been good, but not what they were when the show got bounced last May.  The fault for that entirely rests with CBS, which engaged in the same insane scheduling that has hurt other shows such as Lost and Heroes.  The idea of ordering a limited run of episodes, then deciding whether or not to finish a season, is what seriously wounded Jericho.  When you break fan continuity on a show with as many subplots as Jericho had, you run a terrible risk.

Jericho also had the problem of running against the Fox Network's lead-out bookend of American Idol, and that did not help the show in its final weeks last season -- even though it routinely beat that Fox show!

But I digress.  The vice-president of CBS Interactive, Patrick Keane, has stumbled onto something exciting.  Keane and CBS just announced that when you add online viewings of Jericho episodes to the Nielsen totals, the ratings for Jericho improve by almost a full point.  That would, if my memory serves me correctly, have the show winning its time slot almost every week since the show reappeared seven weeks ago.  Here's the story, from  www.mediabuyerplanner.com:

Jericho Gains a Point When Online Views Added

A veep at CBS Interactive wants big video content producers to come up with combined ratings that include both online and offline viewings.  Patrick Keane, vice president and chief marketing officer for CBS Interactive, said the aggregate ratings would provide media buyers with a simple and detailed cross-platform look at the numbers.

Keane cited the fan-resuscitated show Jericho, which he said increased by nearly a full ratings point when online video is figured in. Jericho is an especially appropriate example because the extra ratings point could keep it from getting cancelled once again. Keane also pointed out that the Grammys, a show with a ratings dip 15 percent this year, would also benefit by having the number of video streams figured in.

Keane said CBS Interactive closely tracks the correlation between when shows air and subsequent online behavior spikes. He produced a chart, according to MediaPost, that showed how predictably online usage increases after certain kinds of programming airs. Keane also pointed out that online activity doesn’t cannibalize the broadcast audience, indicating that advertisers need not pull from one category to add to the other.

http://www.mediabuyerplanner.com/2008/03/19/jericho-gains-a-point-when-online-views-added/

Jericho has dealt with a terrorist attack on 23 American cities, and we now know the attacks were pinned on North Korea and Iran, two nations that in Jericho's universe now glow in the dark in retaliation.  Only these nations were not the cause; they were victims, as were the hapless residents of those 23 cities.  The nuclear acts were domestic in origin and aimed at toppling a government that one instigator thought to be too corrupt to continue. 

The producers and writers of Jericho were given a very difficult task:  Wrap up a story arc in seven episodes that easily could have taken another seven to complete.  As a result, the episodes have moved forward at breakneck speed, leaving viewers barely enough time to catch a breath.  Amazingly, story continuity has not been lost, even with the need for speed. 

For example, the Hudson River Virus -- a story subplot that was originally conceived for multiple episodes -- had to be resolved in one episode.  That virus jumped the "Blue Line" at the Mississippi River and headed due west, killing hundreds in a Missouri town until the Army relented and sent vaccine there. In the meantime, Jericho was denied vaccine, and had to buy an entire vaccine shipment on the black market and then steal it back from a contractor to the new government in Cheyenne who seized it from the town.  The entire town of roughly 2,300 was vaccinated in a midnight operation that lasted one night.  The contractor, a mysterious, shadowy NGO called Jennings and Rall, with obvious winks at real-life giants Haliburton and Bechtel, plays the role of villain throughout the entire second season.  

The season finale (that is how CBS is referring to it, not the Series Finale) takes place this Tuesday at 10PM Eastern time.  My advice is to get online and watch as many episodes of Jericho as it takes to get all caught up.  Then tune in next Tuesday and let's see if we can save a show a second time.  There's one loose nuke left, and we have to see if Texas sides with the Allied States of America, or the old republic east of the Mississippi.