Professor John Sydney Oxfordis an English virologist, Professor of Queen Mary, University of London. He is a leading expert on influenza, including bird flu and the 1918 Spanish Influenza, and HIV/AIDS... (wikipedia)
If it gets itself rooted there, it will be even more difficult to get it out than Southeast Asia.
What we do not want is either a New Orleans situation or a Tsunami situation -- that is you could predict something was going to happen but you don't do anything about it to prepare.
You can break the chain of transmission into the human population. The best place to break it is either to protect the domestic birds from the migratory birds. Or alternatively, remove humans from the domestic birds and break the chain of transmission and you are halfway there.
We will probably learn a lot about bird migration by discovering where the H5N1 virus crops up.
That is the danger with influenza compared to any other virus I know that it can suddenly transform itself, reinvent itself and spread around the world.
These are horrendous developments, whether you're a human or if you're a bird. Everyone wondered what would happen if avian influenza came to Africa, but no one really prepared. They waited. Now it's there -- and this is not the most organized continent in the world.