Just when you thought it was safe to kiss chickens again... WASHINGTON POST Asia correspondent comes out with this fascinating book on the history of the struggle against bird flu (H5N1). And guess what? It's not over yet.

Right now the media's attention is on the "swine" flu (H1N1) that spread from Mexico in April 2009. It's now spread to many countries around the world and is killing a disproportionate number of children.

The media's attention of the pandemic threat of H5N1 stopped many catastrophic news cycles ago. Yet the H5N1 is still a threat. It's deeply entrenched in the chicken populations of China, probably some wild birds and no doubt Indonesia and other countries.

We never got the 1918-style massively lethal pandemic that experts in 2005 were predicting. The H5N1 virus never mutated into a strain that is both highly lethal and highly contagious.

Yet some people who have contact with chickens get it. And some people who have contact with those people get it. Over the years, the lethality rate has consistently averaged 60%.

However, it's not easily spread through coughing, sneezing and germs in the environment, as seasonal (and swine) flu are.

This book is a fascinating look at the human and political stories related to bird flu. Sipress takes us to witch doctors in Indonesia, cockfights and chicken farms in Thailand, high levels World Health Organization (WHO) meetings in Geneva, chicken smuggling trails on the China-Vietnam border, a Buddhist temple in Phnom Penh where "merit birds" are released from cages to earn good karma, a for-show chicken vaccination in Java, a "wet market" (selling live chickens) in Jakarta, and a slaughterhouse in Hanoi selling forged health certificates for chickens.

We meet with WHO flu experts, bird flu victims in their deathbeds, their grieving relatives, the Indonesian health minister withholding flu samples until promised the vaccine that might be made from them, the Vietnamese scientist creating their own bird flu vaccine, and epidemiologists tracking diseases through real minefields of war and metaphorical minefields of international politics.

My only real criticism is that this book mentions but fails to chronicle the stories of bird flu outside Southeast Asia. It's infected people in Pakistan, Iraq, Bangladesh, Egypt and Nigeria. What's happening in Africa, which makes the poverty of Southeast Asia look like Beverly Hills?

Through it all runs the argument that someday, somewhere... H5N1 will mutate or recombine or trade RNA segments with another flu strain (H1N1 is now a likely candidate) to create the flu experts' nightmare -- a virus that kills up to 60% of its victims and which spreads as easily as seasonal flu.

And his argument is that, despite the horror this would cause the world, politics, poverty and cultural traditions are preventing the world's experts from properly defending us all against a repeat (or worse) of 1918.

I frankly don't know if another 1918-style pandemic is as likely as the doomsayers want us to believe. However, this book is a fascinating account and description of life and death in the most interesting part of the world.