In the shadow of the Bird Flu
By the time you read this, I will
have had to face my phobia
and take a flu shot.
(Jasper’s already had his half-shot: our little man is too little for the full dose, so he has to go back in a couple of weeks.) This is a reaction to media-fuelled fear of the Avian Flu that’s sweeping the globe, a pandemic ready to mutate and decimate our numbers.
If you look at Mankind as an infection – a particularly successful one at that – and the planet Earth as our host, it shouldn’t surprise any of us if we are eventually wiped out by the Universal equivalent of a course of penicillin.
Despite our best self-destructive efforts, we’ve failed to keep down the world population, and were that not bad enough, the six billion and counting of us don’t look after our environment. You can call me paranoid, but I believe Mother Earth is out to get us.
For interested parties who desire a little further reading on this subject, I can recommend The Hot Zone by Richard Preston. It’s about scientists working in Washington, D.C. on imported monkies. To cut a long story short, one of the monkies has the Ebola virus. Normally this virus can only be transmitted by bodily fluids, but it mutates and becomes an airborne strain. By the time the lead scientist discovers this, he has inhaled the virus and spent a night out in D.C., ensuring it has already been spread outside of the lab.
As a work of fiction, it would be mildly hair-raising: but this is a true story. Fortunately for up to 90% of the population of the developed world, during the mutation to an airborne strain, Ebola became benign to humans.
The only sensible reaction to all the potential adversity out there is scream silently, unplug the phone and TV and lie under our duvets with a flashlight and a limitless supply of snacks. Unfortunately, our mortgage company might object. And who knows, this Avian Flu scare might be just that: another scare.
It’s not impossible that West Nile Virus will turn out to be the cure for Avian Flu, in which case Hudsonites should all be fine! Sleep well.
