H5N1 (one of 15 Avian Influenza strains) has been simmering in Asia since December 2003, and has claimed at least 54 human and countless (more than 100 million as of last year) poultry lives. "Most influenza experts also agree that the prompt culling of Hong Kong’s entire poultry population [due to H5N1 infection] in 1997 probably averted a pandemic." The WHO has been closely tracking the situation in Viet Nam (later expanded to Cambodia) since December of 2004. They aren’t raising the pandemic alert level above its January 2004 level ("incipient pandemic", near as I can tell), but neither are they lowering it. China’s unwillingness to share information and propensity to do stupid things (and then deny them) are probably creating the greatest hindrance to minimizing the pandemic threat.
It’s a bummer that poultry farming practices in Asia are creating a nearly ideal virus incubation and mutation lab. The conspiracist in me wants to see some significance in the fact that the government of the world’s most populous nation is behaving in a way that is encouraging a situation that could wipe out a substantial chunk of the world’s population, but I find it hard to take the conspiracist in me very seriously most of the time.