With flu season officially beginning Saturday, health authorities in Wisconsin are optimistic that the panic- inducing vaccine shortages of the past two years won’t strike again.
But they’re fretting over another, increasingly worrisome, prospect: that bird flu in Asia might start infecting people more easily. That could enable the virus, which has killed 60 people in Southeast Asia so far, to explode into a worldwide flu outbreak worse than any seen since 1918, when as many as 50 million people died.