Nothing But Love :: golf blogger

Interview

Is anyone else distressed that pesky scientists have recreated the Spanish flu that killed 50 million people back in 1918 from pieces of the virus taken from the frozen corpse of a victim of that pandemic?

Scene: Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (interview already in progress)

It was a very easy thing to do ... just take the virus from that old lady corpse laying over there that was frozen since 1918 and combine it with modern flu viruses we got from a dude that just got back from Hong Kong the other day. Voila, new flu virus.

What did you hope to accomplish by doing this?

Ah-ah-ah-ah-choo! Whoa! Excuse me, seem to have picked up some kind of bug somewhere. Well, we wanted to prepare for a possible future pandemic, learn lessons from 1918, so to speak. We thought it was important to do this, you know, to really understand the mechanism of transmission and stuff like that, so we could get a vaccine together and advise the public of other measures to avoid transmitting the disease.

This modern flu virus from Hong Kong ... is that related at all to the H5N1 asian flu virus we've heard so much about?

What do you mean "related?" It's the real deal. Bird flu. You see, we took the 1918 virus, the one that killed off 50 million people, and we combined it with H5N1 just to see what would happen ... in the lab, of course. It's all controlled. We know what we're doing. We're all, you know, into this bio-medical research and stuff like that. Advanced degrees and all. There's no real danger. We've taken precautions. Reverse air flow, washing our hands, dusting with DDT on the way out, you know ... all the precautions. We wouldn't want this baby to get out. It'd wipe out half the planet. Heh, heh ... pretty funny if it did ... dontcha think? That's an epidemiologist joke, heh heh.

I notice that the others are wearing ... errr ...

Bunny suits ... yeah, heh heh, they're being extra careful, but there's no real danger ... if there was, do you think I'd be talking to you with just my lab coat on? Well, pants and a shirt, too ... and one of those funky hats for my hair. Heh, heh. Ah-choo ... Shit, what the fuck ... damn, I'm catching my kid's cold. And yaknow, that's the real problem today in epidemiology ... too many kids in schools ...

What do you mean?

Well ... one kid gets it ... whammo! You can guess the rest ... pandemic, just like that. 3 ... 400 million dead piled up in the streets ... but the work we're doing here *ah-ah-choo* will go a long way toward figuring out how to prevent that from happening. We run the scenarios with these Department of Defense programs. We'll get it all figured out.

Well, thanks for taking the time out of your day to expose us to the important research you are doing. We'll go back to you, Ted, in the studios in New York.

Posted by Bill at October 8, 2005 07:25 AM