farmers can't afford mandated measures keeping their bird livestock from contact with wild birds (and other measures) thus risking losing their livelihood altogether. Multinational poultry farming is increasingly becoming a profit loser as H5N1 achieves status as endemic in wild birds worldwide. Financial ruin for poor poultry farmers, that can be as severe as threatening starvation, has caused some to commit suicide and many others to stop cooperating with efforts to deal with H5N1; further increasing the human toll, the spread of the disease and the chances for a pandemic mutation. Political US HHS Secretary Michael O. Leavitt has said "Everything you say in advance of a pandemic is alarmist; anything you do after it starts is inadequate." H5N1, like many other topics, is subject to political spin; wherein every interest group picks and chooses among the facts to support their favorite cause resulting in a distortion of the overall picture, the motivations of the people involved and the believability of the predictions. Donald Rumsfeld, formerly United States Secretary of Defense, is a past board member and current minor shareholder of Gilead Sciences which owns intellectual property rights to Oseltamivir (also called "Tamiflu"). In November 2005, George W. Bush urged Congress to pass 7.1 billion in emergency funding to prepare for the possible bird flu pandemic, of which one billion is solely dedicated to the purchase, and distribution of Tamiflu. Some believe H5N1 is a problem of industrial poultry practices. Others have a more nuanced position. According to the CDC article H5N1 Outbreaks and Enzootic Influenza by Robert G. Webster et al.:"Transmission of highly pathogenic H5N1 from domestic poultry back to migratory waterfowl in western China has increased the geographic spread. The spread of H5N1 and its likely reintroduction to domestic poultry increase the need for good agricultural vaccines. In fact, the root cause of the continuing H5N1 pandemic threat may be the way the pathogenicity of H5N1 viruses is masked by cocirculating influenza viruses or bad agricultural vaccines." Dr. Robert Webster explains: "If you use a good vaccine you can prevent the transmission within poultry and to humans. But if they have been using vaccines now [in China] for several years, why is there so much bird flu? There is bad vaccine that stops the disease in the bird but the bird goes on pooping out virus and maintaining it and changing it. And I think this is what