Flap over nothing

Who believes that bird flu may cause as many as 50 million deaths? Ross Clark doesn’t, and here’s why

I don’t personally know anyone suffering from malaria or tuberculosis, but I imagine that if they have been following the Western media they must have found the past week somewhat surreal. Half a billion people are now suffering from malaria, of whom about one million will be dead by this time next year. Nine million are suffering from tuberculosis, two million of whom will die in the next 12 months. Both diseases, which many in the West may have assumed were well on their way to eradication (it would be no surprise if some GCSE biology candidates had never even heard of them), have been resurgent in recent years, as a result of complacency, poverty and, in the case of malaria, the total banning on environmental grounds of DDT, the pesticide which had a massive effect on the disease in the 1950s and 1960s.