Trust is not transitive, as someone recently pointed out, when reporting on the airline pilot who carried a gun into the cockpit and then accidentally or negligently discharged it and blew a hole in the plane. We had every reason to trust the pilot to be able to fly a 747, but not necessarily to handle a firearm properly. Trust isn't transitive.
There is no doubt that Yi Guan, a professor at the University of Hong Kong, is an expert on H5N1 virus, its genetic lineages and surveillance for the virus in wild birds. He has reportedly screened, via cloacal swabs and fecal specimens, more than 200,000 wild and free ranging aquatic birds and poultry in China since 2000. So if he has an opinion about whether proper surveillance can stop a pandemic it is reasonable to listen to what he says and consider it seriously. But it is not necessarily reasonable to trust his judgment because he is an expert at the lab bench in using surveillance specimens. Because once Guan talks about a pandemic he is talking about a global scale outbreak of disease in human beings. That involves epidemilogy. So I am slightly skeptical of a pronouncement by someone whose speciality is surveillance of birds, not the epidemiology of influenza in people:
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