IMO, anytime someones starts issuing warning about a worldwide pandemic, it must be appropriations time.
I'm not a doctor or even have any real knowledge about virology, but I do know that we live in 2005 and pandemics predates modern medicine.
You are right, you are not a virologist and not a doctor. This disease has a high mortality, is affecting other species than birds and they think the victims die so fast that they have missed the early human cases where virus is in feces, blood, saliva and every organ fails. This is nothing to laugh about.