Bird Flu in Bangladesh

Apart from the prices of daily necessities shooting up, I believe that the Bird flu is the newest threat the people of Bangladesh should be concerned of.
Notice how I used the term 'should be' instead of 'are'. In spite of the increasing number of ads and newspaper headings about how many chickens are being killed everyday, and how dangerous the bird flu situation can get, I fail to see any effect of the efforts of the media in our daily lifestyle.
For example, a few weeks ago I paid a visit to a local fast food store I was surprised to find that the price of the chicken items had risen .It seemed that the demand for chicken in the high society had not fallen a bit, to say the least. I checked out a few other food shops out of curiosity and found out similar price rises. What I had expected to see was that they would stop selling the chicken items totally, or at the least, people would stop buying them.
What I found even more surprising was that not a single family I know has, at least, decreased the amount of daily chicken intake .
Even the British Council has provided the students in their practical examinations with fried chicken for lunch. Yep, the entire country has gone coo coo.
Perhaps this is because of the apathetic attitude of the common people, who have definitely gone numb with so many things such as price rises, uncertainty in the election, price rises, the state of emergency of the country, and did I mention the price rises? Or perhaps it is the lack of effort of the media. The media, as I have seen, is playing a complex role in this matter. The page in a newspaper that contains an awareness article about bird flu at the top, also contains an advertisement of a poultry farm stating that chicken cooked over 70 degrees for over 30 minutes is safe. Every awareness program concerning the disease explicitly states that properly cooked chicken is safe. while this is true, we should remember that whosoever is cooking the chicken is handling uncooked chicken, and is therefore prone to catch the disease. However , little emphasis is given to this fact in the awareness programs. While the ads state how a chicken should be thoroughly washed before handling, they forget that the chicken IS being handled while it is being washed.
Let us set these things aside. In a country where thousands of children die of Diarrhoea, where the water supply is polluted in most regions, why would the common people take a completely new so called disease , no cases of which has yet been found in Bangladesh?
The reason is ,the disease is called by a virus .The interesting, but dangerous thing about a virus is that it undergoes mutations within itself and changes its properties within a matter of days. There are currently 12 strains of the virus, some of them being harmless, others being able to kill within hours. We can never predict which strain of virus we are taking in while we are eating chicken. What we can assume , is that this disease has the full potential of turning in to a pandemic.
If the disease does turn into a pandemic, one in every four person in the country would contract the disease. Offices and schools might close , hospitals , might run out of space,the whole country might come down to a standstill. Millions might die.
So it falls down to us that we take the appropriate measure to tackle this bird flu problem in the best way possible-get as much information from wherever we can, and share the information and create awareness all around us, so that we can prevent this disease from turning into a disaster.