Why are you writing this anyway?

The quick answer is that this is the final element of a really big project I'm doing for a college class. The longer answer is that I'm really interested in avian influenza (specifically the strain A/H5N1 in all its weird iterations). I did a small national survey for the paper part of this project, and I was pretty freaked out by how little the respondents knew about bird flu. Even worse, they thought they knew a lot and that they'd be fine in a pandemic! That over-confidence would mean bad things if bird flu spread globally in humans. So I want to spread accurate, up-to-date information without trying to freak you out. I'm not in mass media, I'm not even in advertising or health care - I'm just interested and concerned.