Using NewsHour Extra Feature Stories

Overview: NewsHour Extra features stories can help students identify and interpret key issues in current events. This activity anticipates one class period, but the follow-up essay might be assigned as homework, or in another period.

Warm Up: Use initiating questions to introduce the topic and find out how much your students know.

Main Activity: Have students read NewsHour Extra's feature story and answer the questions on the reading comprehension handout.

Discussion: Use discussion questions to encourage students to think about how the issues outlined in the story affect their lives and express and debate different opinions.

Follow-up: Students can write an 500-word editorial on the topic expressing their views and send it to NewsHour Extra [extra@newshour.org] for possible publication.

Evaluation: Students are graded on their answers to reading comprehension questions and/or their editorial.

Story: Health Officials Prepare For Bird Flu Pandemic, 10/12/05
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/features/july-dec05/birdflu_10-12.html

Initiating Questions:

1. What is a virus? How is it different than a bacterium?

2. How are viruses spread?

3. What are some recent major recent health problems?

Reading Comprehension Questions: (click here for printout)

1. What major threat has health officials working together?

The threat of a deadly bird flu is the latest health scare to spur emergency planning in the United States and around the world.

The top U.S. health official, Michael Leavitt, is traveling to Southeast Asia, where the avian or bird flu has spread through poultry and killed 60 people since 2003.

2. How likely is the threat of a flu pandemic?

Leavitt said the risk of a flu pandemic - a flu outbreak that impacts many people around the world - is high.

"The likelihood of another [pandemic] is very high, some say even certain," Leavitt said in Thailand, where he is meeting with health officials about prevention efforts.

3. What is avian flu and whom does it infect?

Avian or bird flu is an infection caused by an influenza virus that occurs naturally in wild birds. Often referred to as the H5N1 virus, bird flu is spread easily among birds and can sicken and kill domesticated birds such as chickens, ducks and turkeys.

The virus does not usually infect humans but some humans have become infected after coming into contact with sick birds or contaminated surfaces.

4. Can humans get bird flu? Why is this a threat?

Very few people have contracted the virus from a person, in what is called human-to-human contact. But scientists fear that because humans rarely get infected they also lack immune protection from the virus.

If the virus mutates or changes, as viruses often do, and becomes easily spread from person to person, experts worry that millions around the world could be infected.

5. What are officials doing to stop the threat of bird flu?

To prevent the wide-spread infection of millions, health officials are working to increase flu monitoring that will determine if people are getting the virus and to create flu vaccine stockpiles that can be used to contain infection.

"If you can get there fast enough and apply good public health techniques of isolating and quarantining and medicating and vaccinating the people in that area, you can ... squelch it or you can delay it," Leavitt told the Associated Press.

6. Is there a bird flu vaccine? What other drugs are available? What do they do?

Currently, one vaccine shows promise in fighting the virus, but making enough of it could take months because each virus is different.

"When and if a flu pandemic virus emerges, we will need to make vaccine to that virus so it's really not possible to stock pile a vaccine in large quantities in advance," Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told the NewsHour.

If the vaccine is not ready, antiviral drugs like Tamiflu and Relenza, which do not cure influenza, could help reduce the number of infections and deaths.

7. What do critics have to say about international and domestic efforts to prevent a bird flu pandemic?

But some critics of international efforts say not enough money is being allocated to contain the virus in birds.

Farmers in poor countries like Vietnam and Indonesia are reluctant to kill birds exposed to the virus because they lose money needed to feed their own families. This could increase the chances of the virus spreading.

In the United States, some lawmakers point to the slow government response to Hurricane Katrina as evidence that local officials are not prepared for large-scale emergencies.

Discussion Activity (more research might be needed):

1. Do you think the world health community is doing enough to prevent a bird flu pandemic? What would you do differently and why? Explain your answer.

2. How do vaccines work? How are they made? What technologies are being investigated to improve this process? Why don't many companies want to invest in vaccine production?

3. Research the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918. What are scientists learning about the virus that caused so many millions of deaths? What lessons can be learned from that great pandemic?

Write a 300-500 word essay on any of these topics providing clear examples. Send your completed editorial to NewsHour Extra [extra@newshour.org]. Exceptional essays might be published on our Web site.