Don't let a recent TV movie about bird flu in America scare you, says Alan Poss, Wilkes County Emergency Management Agency director.

"It was just a movie," he said. "There is no bird flu epidemic, anywhere in the world, like they showed in the movie 'Fatal Contact.'"

Some folks took it for real, he said, and are all upset over nothing. "It was just fiction. It wasn't real," Poss said.

In fact, only 200 cases of human avian influenza - bird flu - infection have been identified in the whole world in the last three years, and every case has involved humans coming into direct fecal or bodyfluid contact with an infected bird, inhaling the virus.

But the movie was partly based on one possibility that some scientists worry about. If the virus mutates and acquires the ability to pass easily from person to person, it could cause a pandemic.

That's a lot of ifs, mights, and coulds, but the possibility has made the Georgia poultry industry and Georgia Department of Agriculture take steps to prepare to deal with avian influenza.

"The poultry industry in Georgia cooperates with the Georgia Poultry Laboratory Network to test each poultry flock on the farm before it leaves to be processed," said Mike Giles, vice-president of the Georgia Poultry Federation, in a UGA press release.

In the release, by Faith Peppers of UGA's College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, Giles said that if avian influenza were to be detected, the flock would be humanely destroyed and the birds disposed of in an approved way.

Then the affected farm would be quarantined and the premises cleaned, disinfected, and left idle for a prescribed time to be sure the virus is killed.

"The poultry industry is taking every precaution to produce a safe and wholesome product," Giles said.

Plus, the way poultry is produced here should be a further comfort, Giles said. Unlike traditional poultry production in Asian countries, U.S. growers raise chickens in confined buildings. He noted that the

people who have contracted the H5N1 virus all got it from direct contact with infected live birds. And in the U.S., "very few people today ever have close contact with live chickens," he said.

With all that, Chief Poss said, "I hope nobody took that movie last week for the truth. If the bird flu did show up here, I think we'd be able to deal with it. And for goodness sake, yes, it's safe to eat chicken."