Don't worry, you live in a rich country — but so does bird flu

I vaguely remember seeing photos of Chinese people dressed in business suits and school uniforms wearing white masks over their mouths and hearing about something called "bird flu," but I never really placed it in my consciousness until today.

Over the weekend a bird flu outbreak was discovered in Britain, and although no humans have yet been infected, the event has made headlines around the world.

As recent as it may seem, the first bird flu outbreak was 10 years ago, and less than 200 people have died from bird flu since then, but the fear the virus could mutate and pass between humans and not just from birds to humans has kept it in the spotlight.

The truth is if bird flu were to break out among humans, there is little any government could do to prevent it from spreading.

The virus takes several days before its symptoms appear in humans, and that means that the person carrying the disease could fly around the world and mix with local populations before they even knew they were infected.

So what can be done? Every time the virus infects a new host, the likelihood of its mutation into a human-to-human strain increases. Every second counts and it doesn't matter whether the outbreak takes place in rich country like Britain or a poor one like Vietnam — once the virus mutates, there's no stopping it.

With all this in mind, it's time for the world to create an international response team capable of responding to outbreaks anywhere on the globe with the same force and organization as the British teams showed this weekend.

If governments don't act now, they may never have another chance.

Some things are not worth fighting for

Last month a Libyan court sentenced five Bulgarian nurses to death for deliberately infecting 426 Libyan children with HIV.

The five women have been in jail for the past eight years and claim their guilty confessions were extracted under torture.

Last week Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi sent his son to announce Libya would be willing to negotiate for the release of the nurses (just like a kidnapping), a proposal that has been met with mixed responses.

The U.S. State Department applauded the gesture, and this past weekend Bulgarian newspapers reported secret talks between American, Libyan, French, Italian and British officials had been taking place in Switzerland and France to try to hatch a deal for the nurses' release.

If blackmail is the game that Gaddafi and the Libyan government are going to be allowed to play with the international community, then the United States and the European Union should take this opportunity to re-evaluate their relationship with Libya.

The U.S. and the E.U. recently improved their relationships with Libya, which President Bush originally named as a country alienated with the Axis of Evil in 2002.

Following the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, the U.S. government has played down its claims of only supporting human rights-conscious regimes. The E.U. does, however, claim to exclusively support human rights-conscious governments and the Libyan situation is a test of its commitment to such principles.

The E.U. should save face and not cave in to al-Gaddafi by awarding Libya a prize for the despicable way in which its government has treated five of its citizens.

The U.S., on the other hand, should negotiate with the Libyan government and allow al-Gaddafi this one victory regardless of how unjustly it has been achieved.

Give al-Gaddafi what he wants this time around with a Borat warning that if he tries this again, "He'll be sorry."

Al-Gaddafi will be remembered as a dictator and a terrorist by anyone who opens a history book with his name in it. Some things are not worth fighting for.

Reach reporter Jake Sommer at news@thedaily.washington.edu.