This seems to me worth worrying about. Much more so, in fact, than shark attacks and missing girls in Aruba.

I have some Tamiflu in the freezer, just in case. The stuff will be nearly impossible to get if a pandemic breaks out.

See www.recombinomics.com for more scare-oriented coverage.

There's a strong cultural denial/forgetting mechanism at work. I first realized it c. 1980 in connection with the Spanish Flu, which (like others growing up in the we've-conquered-disease midcentury) I knew almost nothing about.. until a conversation with my grandmother about WWI. It was clear that the flu held a *much* bigger place in her memory than everything about the war combined.

So I went looking for more about it, and found little (not the case today). I thought: a pandemic that killed several times more than the war, and it gets a line or two in the history books among all the other causes of post-war turbulence? What's wrong with this picture?

Maybe denial and forgetting were sound evolved responses to millennia of catastrophes we could do nothing to prevent -- but now that we can, denial is anything but adaptive.

Good point,Rand. So,what's the latest from Aruba about Natalee?

Maybe denial and forgetting were sound evolved responses to millennia of catastrophes we could do nothing to prevent

I was going to toss out the Black Death as a counter-example but perhaps that was an exception. You might well be right - certainly other epidemics before 1918 were not mentioned in detail but affected their survivors; the typhoid epidemics in London, similar ones in Colonial America and so on.

I've said it before - this is a _good_ decade to live in smaller burgs far away from large cities.

The effect of a pandemic on modern society is actually an interesting one to think about. Were the Black Death to reappear (I'm not one who holds to the idea that it was the bubonic plague) or if Ebola-Reston were to make the species jump, civilization would actually collapse. Airborne + long incubation/contagious periods (up to a 30/20 days in the Black Death) + death rates of about 70% of the infected population=a complete collapse of modern industrial society.

I find the complete lack of cooperation from China interesting- particularly the fact that it does not seem to worry anyone on The Hill. Too many US bubbas are making big profits selling cheap Chinese crap--- Walmart, Target, K-Mart, Home Depot, Lowes..... etc, etc.
Don't worry- they're our pals. Tiannaman Square was just a little trouble with radical college students like we had at Kent State once... certainly can't have young Chinese people demonstrating for DEMOCRACY, can we?
Good ole Nixon started this let's buddy up to China BS- and it's gonna bite us one way or another. What's a little flu among "friends?"

Airborne + long incubation/contagious periods (up to a 30/20 days in the Black Death) + death rates of about 70% of the infected population=a complete collapse of modern industrial society.

Perhaps I'm foolishly optimistic. The Black Death (whatever it's cause) as well as other plagues pre modern era were bad because the victims simply didn't know what was causing the plagues.

Given a 70% death rate for infected - the trick will be to keep the number of infected down. Which, given a bit of common sense and a bit of luck, should be possible. If you're a hard core Libertarian or ACLU-ist the measures needed will cause some heartburn ...

What I find interesting is that Rand links to an article that's mostly about a column by a guy who isn't an expert in the field, and the rest is mostly links to other bloggers and fear mongering sites.

Perhaps I'm foolishly optimistic. The Black Death (whatever it's cause) as well as other plagues pre modern era were bad because the victims simply didn't know what was causing the plagues.

To be accurate, we still really don't know what caused the Black Death. They did know that it was airborne back then however.

To be accurate, we still really don't know what caused the Black Death. They did know that it was airborne back then however.

I think it wasn't till recently that they had some idea of what flu variant (an "avian flu" IIRC) caused the pandemic of 1918. I seem to recall some debate on whether the flu or opportunistic secondary infections caused all the deaths of that pandemic. The problem is that actual cultures of the disease don't survive decades except under extremely generous circumstances.

So it is little surprise that the origins of the Black Death are disputed. Even if it was bubonic plague, it was an extremely virulent form. IIRC, it is thought that most instances of the disease weren't spread by air, just the most lethal version of the disease.