There's an interesting story in today's New York Times about Google's philanthropy arm, Google.org, and the executive director it hired earlier this year, Larry Brilliant. Unlike most charities and foundations, Google.org won't actually be non-profit. It will be structured as a for-profit organization, which means that Google will have to pay taxes on whatever it earns. Dr. Brilliant, who played a big part in eradicating smallpox in India in the 1970s, says he had hesitations about this kind of structure at first, but he now believes that it will enable Google to donate more creatively by funding health care and environmental innovations that can be used to help cure the world's ills. "Why would we put Wi-Fi in a place where what they need is food and clean water?" he says. Seems like Brilliant has a wider scope and more practical way of thinking than a lot of the folks insulated out in Silicon Valley.

At this very moment, Japanese health inspectors may be poring over the first shipment of U.S. beef to Japan in seven months. The Japanese cracked down on U.S. meat shipments after the first U.S. case of BSE in December 2003, but after months of wrangling the governments recently helped broker a deal to end the ban. Whether Japanese consumers will bite is another matter:

We don't know when we get the next shipment," the official said, adding that they would like to see reaction from Japanese consumers before making additional buy orders. Japanese retailers are generally cautious about restarting sales of U.S. beef, as media polls have shown that many Japanese consumers remain concerned about its safety.

In fact, one poll reports that more than 70 percent of Japanese won't be sampling the new shipments. Australian and South American exporters have benefited from these doubts, but some Japanese appear to have soured on beef altogether—it's declining as a source of protein in the country.   

Government officials and financial leaders got together this morning in Washington, D.C. to discuss the economic impact of an avian flu pandemic. The not-so-exciting consensus? Uncertainty.

The two most popular words at the conference, held at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, were "it depends". It seems there are simply too many factors - the nature of the virus itself, the flexibility of supply chains, the capacity of critical information networks - to give any kind of accurate portrait of what an epidemic would mean for markets. 

So what is the critical determing factor on which everyone agrees? How people - and governments - respond to a crisis when it emerges.

There are some odd goings on in the Chinese medical community. A group of scientists submitted a research letter to the New England Journal of Medicine arguing that a 2003 case of SARS was actually bird flu. On Wednesday, after the Journal had already decided to publish the letter, at least one of the scientists sought to retract it for reasons that are unclear. The World Health Organization is following the case closely and wants a meeting with the Chinese authorities. Readers of FP will recall that in our March/April issue, Karl Taro Greenfeld chronicled the experience of a Chinese doctor who braved official censure to tell the world about SARS in China. It's too early to know for sure, but we may have more medical whistleblowers at work.