Typical engineering logic.
Your choice is NOT "to build huge levees or do nothing", "to shoot
hundreds of thousands of birds or do nothing".
Your choice is, given the amount of money your government has at its
disposal, how best to spend it. I'd suggest that rather than spending
vast amounts on huge levees, to give tax breaks on flood-tolerant
housing (on stilts, etc) or relocation grants. In the case of the bird
flu, the choice is to research a useful vaccine rather than eradicating
the possible vector.
Also to realise that if a government loses a hundred thousand citizens
(in anything but a "patriotic war") it's going to lose the next election
no matter what it did.
Bill
-----Original Message-----
From: Mike Simpson
Sent: Tuesday, 27 September 2005 4:59 PM
To: Bill Stent; 'BIRDING-AUS'
Subject: 'Bird flu' checks stepped up
>Cripes. It's the equivalent of various departments of conservation
felling
>trees near paths "just in case" they fall on a bushwalker. Or (closer
to
>my experience) dam builders overengineering "just in case"
>there's a 1 in 1000 year flood.
Unfortunately, that is probably what they said about the guy who
designed
the levees around New Orleans...
In these days of instant world wide communications, any government which
does not take precautions to protect the majority of it's citizens will
not
last long. If bird flu mutated and was capable of passing from person to
person, and a few hundred thousand died in OZ, do you really think
anyone
would forgive a government which had not looked into the possibility of
migratory birds carrying the disease?
Regards, Mike
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