Biothermal RFID Chips to Track Avian Flu

I am not losing any sleep over Avian flu. There is a one in one chance that a person will die of something in the course of their life. It could be an epidemic, a drunk driver, a chunk of ice off the building in downtown Chicago, or whatever, but someday I will probably die. Bird flu is a convenient way for newspapers to try to be sensationalistic to sell advertising space.

Someday you will DEFINATELY die :-)....of course, whether it's avian flu-related is probably unlikely

So, personally, I am not terribly worried about Avian flu either, but the relevant question is not whether you are going to die or not - as eloquently pointed out by the previous posters - it is whether you are going to die PREMATURELY or not due to a flu ravaged chicken. In the world of such concerns it is probably below drunk drivers in snow, and at least for me living in Seattle, above getting hit by falling bricks off of decrepit buildings in Chicago. That being said, the question of whether 1 in 250 is a relevant sample is not a simple. The short answer is something like, if the sample is taken randomly (for example, out of every 1000 chickens you number them, then use a non replacement random number table to divide the group into 4 lots of 250, and then you renumber each lot, use a random number table and pick you victim out of each group) then the sample can be representative. It also will give a certain degree of statistical resolution. What this means is that, as you increase a sample size from a population, your sample gets closer and closer to looking like the population. Your resolution of determining the differences between the sample and the population get better and better. So, one way of rephrasing the question is: what is the probability that that some percentage of the population of chickens gets avian flu without my being able to detect it with a .4% sampling rate. Or conversely, if I do detect avian flu in my .4% sample, what is the probability that some critical percentage of chickens in the population have it. The math is pretty straightforward - check hypothesis testing in any first year college stats book - but the real answer would have to also involve things like how easy is it for avian flu to move from one chicken to the next, and in general, if someone owns chickens that people will potentially eat, what is the typical population of chickens that they have.

Silas, the size of the sample appears correct because we must think about the consistent population to screen and numbers must be adjusted to make the initiative feasible. About your concerns, I would not feel too stressed about it. Media and newspapers documented very few cases of human patients that got sick in situations that are very uncommon for the average person. They were farmers or family members of farmers that were exposed in a way that the large majority of humans are not. Furthermore, there is no evidence of any sort that the feared mutation needed to jump from species to species occurred. Conclusion: there is no reasonable danger. I am not a doctor, but I would suggest to apply the same precautions you did before the bird-flue news appeared. Make sure about the origin of the bird meat you eat, especially cook it well and stay away from raw meats that before carrying bird flue are vehicle of other common infections.