Exclusive: New York City Health Officials to Hold Bird Flu Tabletop Exercise, by Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D.

New York City officials are planning a tabletop simulation later this month to prepare for a hypothetical bird flu outbreak, a city health official revealed at the International Bird Flu Summit, taking place this week in Fairfax, Virginia.

The summit is sponsored by Gingko Biosecurity, which says it is “building and deploying the next-generation infrastructure and technologies that global leaders need to predict, detect, and respond to a wide variety of biological threats.”

Public health officials, doctors, scientists, researchers and pharmaceutical company representatives convened at the summit amid more reports of bird flu hotspots, including a cluster of eight possible bird flu cases in Missouri. …