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Personally, I do. Maybe within the next year or two. From everything I've read, the virus is too heavily entrenched in places like Indonesia, China and Africa for it to just die out.

While the odds of the corrects mutations taking place are something like 100,000,000 to 1, the fact that there are trillions of virus particles out there, infecting millions of birds -- Not good, to say the least.

Now when you say "a high mortality rate", that depends. I think that a 10% mortality rate would be a catastrophically high number in a pandemic. If you're asking if I think the virus will maintain its current +/- 50% case fatality rate when it mutates to a pandemic strain, I don't. Now, there's a lot of evidence I've seen that shows that influenza viruses don't need to reduce their deadliness when they mutate towards another host species. Also, the virus has been mutating closer to mammals over the past year, it hasn't lost any of its lethality. In spite of this, I do think the mortality rate will drop from its current number. Whatever the final number is, it'll still be ghastly, but I don't think the 50% figure will hold.

But this is just speculation on my part. I hold no epidemiological credentials, so don't take my guesses too seriously.

Rather than take my word for it, it's better to go study up on the virus yourself, and make your own determination.