The Ebola Man is coming

I'm not entirely sure what brought on my (morbid?) fascination with new and emerging diseases, but the fact that H5N1 is a ticking time bomb, plus stories like this one and the quote "...these are good times for pathogens to be invading the human population", actually give me a tingle of excitement.

I'm not against the human race, nor some tree-hugging powered-by-tofu kind of guy, but in some bizarre way I find this fascinatingly...fascinating. I see it as a whole War of the Worlds kind of thing, where in that scenario these hulking "immeasurably superior" aliens are undone because one of them didn't wash their hands after taking a shit.

Wash your damn hands.

And while human health and medical technology is making immense strides, it's amazing how much money is pumped into research and analysis of the human organism and how many billions are spent each year on health care.

All up, the human body is an incredibly complex series of interlocking systems -- and I suggest you watch House to see how one failing thing can mess it up*.

The human body is intriguing, but with this vast complexity, this intermeshing of mechanisms, it's amazing how something so simple, so basic, and so primordial can stuff things up.

Viruses (virii?) and bacteria are very, very simple things. Hell, viruses aren't even considered a living organism, and the prions that cause Scrapie, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), Kuru, Creutzfeldt-Jakob and Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) are actually caused by mutating protein crystals that the body's amino acids cannot break down. You can’t burn them, irradiate them, inoculate against it – once a prion gets in your brain you are stuffed.

Currently as I’m living in Asia, I’m watching the gradual encroachment of H5N1-infected chickens, and the way tiny outbreaks keep popping up around the world I reckon it is only a matter of time before there’s a wide-scale outbreak again. And once H5N1 mutates and becomes easily transmissible, we are going to be fucked...partially.

The WHO estimates 5-150 million dead worldwide. Keep pumping out the Tamiflu, guys.

BTW, there’s a movie coming out this year called Poultrygeist: Attack of the Chicken Zombies. Hopefully when it comes out bird flu is still contained, so it looks like a bad B-grade horror movie, and not a real-life documentary.

We're doing what now?

Singapore at the moment has a freaking massive outbreak of hand, foot andmouth disease in children, and yet the papers aren’t really hyping up the “fucking outbreak, run!” aspect of it, rather they’re keeping the populace calm as usual. So here’s a Singapore foot and mouth Fun Fact: In the last week of March, cases of the potentially fatal disease in children jumped from under 400 cases reported the week before, to 800.

More worrying than H5N1 and foot and mouth, is the fact that I am writing this as one of the first generation born without smallpox vaccination. There’s an entire planetary generation completely susceptible to small pox. Luckily the deadly strains are kept under lock and key, in the States and Russia, although the confessions that Russia had a full program of weaponising strains of smallpox, by the ton, doesn’t exactly ensure the world that all smallpox stores are safe.

So is a global Captain Tripps coming? Who knows, but the not knowing, the encroachment of H5N1, and the rapid emergence of entirely new pathogens keeps things lively…for now.

*I have noticed recently that many House episodes rely on the MRI a little too heavily, with subsequent episodes running along variations of “Run a full MRI!”, “We can’t!”, “Why not?” and so on, with the rest of the episode showing how they get a workaround to stuff the patient in the thing, or how they somehow manage to band together and find some way to diagnose and heal the patient without the MRI. House really should have the MRI in his adjoining office – it would save a lot of limping about and definitely save the producers a lot of money by getting rid of one set location.