On guard for bird flu--and check out our big changes.

• Author: Schwab, Robert
• Position: On Colorado - Re-designing of ColoradoBiz website - Editorial

"BARRING A CATASTROPHE," MY PUBLISHER, BART TAYLOR, said to me last month (although I'm quoting him liberally and not literally), "it really looks like Colorado is on the road to a pretty strong economic expansion."

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I had to agree. There is nothing on the state's economic horizon that should stop the long-lagging business growth that is now charging ahead in Colorado.

The catastrophe, however, could be the much publicized potential bird-flu pandemic.

And yet our state government, the federal government and Colorado State University are already taking steps to control the spread of the flu.

Back in September 2003, I wrote here about how Colorado state government ignored warnings from its own health department about the summer mosquito season bringing West Nile virus to the state on the wings of the bugs. By the time I was writing, more than 50 people had died and more than 50 others had been badly paralyzed or otherwise brought low by the virus.

Bird flu is going to be different. In November, Denver Democratic U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette was mildly critical of the state and federal efforts to track and control the spread of avian flu in Colorado if it comes here, which so far it has not.

Yet both governments, each of which has already drafted flu contingency plans, are far, far ahead of where the state was in spring 2003 when a few Colorado health-department officials were warning of an upcoming rough West Nile season.

The Rocky Mountain News also has already published a special report on the bird-flu threat. In it, the newspaper told how a Colorado State University veterinarian, Kristy Pabilonia, has been out for months this summer and fall swabbing the behinds of birds across the state to determine whether the flu has spread to flocks here.

Her school's program, which is joined by the state health and agriculture departments, is about to expand its survey to wild birds as well. Our state's favorite wild migrant, the Canada goose, has been viewed as the most likely wild carrier of the flu if it makes its way to Colorado.

World health officials note that it's impossible to predict whether the flu will actually mutate into a strain that jumps easily from birds to humans, or one that then jumps easily from human to human. But it's comforting to know that both the state and the federal governments have gotten an early start on trying to mitigate a potential health disaster.

That's what government is for, and that's why some...