If you picked up a copy of the Sunday New York Daily News, you're probably more than a bit concerned about the worst-case scenario of a bird flu outbreak in New York City. According to Dr. Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University, "New York is woefully ill-prepared to deal with a catastrophic bird flu epidemic." The losses would be devastating:

"If the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu becomes easily transmittable among humans, as many experts fear it will, it could kill more than 200 a day in the city and waves of sick patients would overwhelm hospitals... If the virus infects a quarter of us in the city and kills just 2% of those infected, some 40,000 New Yorkers - including 10,000 children - would die in a six- to nine-month epidemic... Although it is unclear exactly how contagious or lethal a pandemic flu virus would be, those casualty estimates are in line with the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, which killed an estimated 50 million people."

The New York Daily News also features another article stating that a city-wide quarantine probably wouldn't work, a warning op-ed piece ("Red Alert on Bird Flu") and a full-length article by Dr. Redlener called "State of Emergency."