The Fatal Strain: On the Trail of Avian Flu and the Coming Pandemic »

Alan Sipress is the economics editor at The Washington Post and a longtime foreign correspondent. He lives in Washington, D.C.

When avian flu began spreading across Asia in the early 2000s, it reawakened fears that had lain dormant for nearly a century. During the outbreak's deadliest years, Alan ...

The Washington Post - David Oshinsky

The bad news, says Alan Sipress in his superb and sobering book about the shadowy progression of a virulent avian flu now moving across Asia, is that the worst is yet to come. Sipress…is uniquely positioned to tell this story. He's intimately familiar with the region, having served as a correspondent in South Asia during the devastating recent tsunami. And his grasp of virology, as well as of the ins and outs of the world health bureaucracy, serves him well in explaining why medical practices that appear so obvious to Western experts in containing a deadly epidemic are largely irrelevant to "the backyard chicken farmers, cockfighters, witch doctors, political bosses, and poultry smugglers" who control the terrain where this battle must be fought.