A SuperStrain look to the future!

Wow! It's 2006, finally!!! January is here, which means the peak and drop-off of flu season, and H5N1 packs up and goes home for another 9 months. Well, caught completely with our pants down I think we did pretty good, as a globe. Next year we have more of the same to look forward to, but we'll also have some fairly good vaccines, bird cull programs, and tamiflu deployment operations in place.

While no doubt some sociopaths are slightly disappointed by the lack of viral carnage this winter, well - uh, screw you. Over 300,000 Pakistanis are dead from the earthquake and subsequent deaths due to exposure, hypothermia and illness brought on by malnutrition and freezing weather conditions because the homeless never got off the streets, the dead never got picked up off the streets, the medics never came, and the shelters were never built. Yes, there was a slight gesture of support from the international community, it did nothing, and downtown Kashmir is still rotting. (And hey, if that's not mast-fodd for you socios then I don't know what is!)

Anyway, I think it's befitting to take a look at the year to come with the highly-trained SuperStrain eye. Bioweapons councils, Dr. Germ's ghostwritten book, possibly a 1918 Spanish Flu/2005 H5N1 Recombo-pack and subsequent vaccine? I mean, don't get me wrong - I'm just a paranoid kid, but if I were heading up a Bioweapons program I'd want to do that straight away. There's probably already several strains in existence, it's only a matter of time before some gets put on the market... the black (plague) market, of course.

And of course, no Jan 1st blog-post would be complete without a look back into the year past! Instead of obsessing on all the really terrible things that happened, i'll obsess on the inane: the International Response to the Threat of a Global Influenza Epidemic (that's it's official name).

Vietnam sure killed a lot of birds, didn't they! For that I give them the gold star of making an interesting study for zooarchaeologists of the distant future. They'll know how many birds you guys killed, they'll know. Indonesia gets my sick-pidgeon award, for having the most lethal and ugly versions of H5N1 and doing basically nothing to try and stop it's spread. They're playing the game of "wait for China to develop a vaccine." Not a very smart move, seeing as China's response was to immunize all poultry in china. The apparent outcome of this was a few dozen ducks got shot full of some sugarwater. The real thing's coming this spring, right guys?

As for Eastern Europe, the front was a total snoozefest. Did anything even get to Hungary? Either the virus isn't very pathogenic or those handsome Turks wearing the masks did their job. Thanks, boys in blue!

And finally the US, which did everything in it's power to stop Bird Flu: by publishing a 17-page report on the threat via the DHS. Watch out world, this tiger gives very nasty papercuts! Well, do be fair, we do have our hands a little full - it is kind of hard being the world's police and the world's doctor. We're only one anthropomorphized nation-state!

Allright folks, keep stockpiling those antivirals, and keep watching the skies!!!