Bird Flu TV Movie in Poor Taste

ABC has apparently announced that they are going to broadcast a made-for-TV movie about the bird flu for May sweeps. It will apparently be an imagining of what would happen if the bird flu was able to be transmitted from humans to other humans and spread here to the US. This sounds like it is in incredibly bad taste, not so much because viral infection movies are bad in and of themselves, but more because of the timing of the broadcast. Scientists are worried that at any time the bird flu will mutate and become transmittable from humans to humans, and some believe it's only a matter of time before this happens. While the flu appears to have started mainly in China, it has spread all the way west, to as far as France, and hit many countries in between China and France, including Turkey, Egypt, Iraq, Nigeria, Azerbaijan, Thailand, and Indonesia. People have died from it in Turkey (four), Egypt (three), Azerbaijan (five), Thailand (two) and Indonesia (sixteen), with the most recent dying just a month ago (in Azerbaijan). So this is something that is actively killing people now, and could quickly kill many more of it mutates into human-transmittable form.

Creating a movie about a disaster that may be imminent is in pretty poor taste, in my opinion. This would be the equivalent of a television network hearing about an impending category 5 hurricane and then making a movie about it and airing it just before the hurricane is due to hit. People are dying and potentially millions will die from this, and it's being treated as a piece of entertainment by ABC. When natural disasters are "far-fetched" or "not imminent" (such as global-warming freezing the planet in just a few days, or an asteroid crashing into the earth), it's fine to make them into entertaining movies. But when something IS imminent, when it IS likely to happen sooner rather than later, I think it's pretty bad judgment to go and make a movie out of it. If ABC really wanted to raise awareness of the bird flu, they should make a documentary about it, not a TV movie to air during May sweeps.