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I love an ornate conspiracy theory.

Could it be that we are under attack? Where, all of a sudden, did all the deadly viruses come from? First, we had AIDS. Not many people looked at the possible causes (other than, of course, it was God's judgment on faggots) and focused on it's effects, killing valuable fairies. Then came West Nile Virus with some logical but fuzzy explanation about birds being infected. Then came Mad Cow disease, mostly a British/European disease, at least 'til last year. Then we had SARS and some blather about eating civet cats in a Chinese restaurant. Then, we had Monkey pox, traced to Gambian rats.

Why now? We've been at risk for all of these for hundreds of years. We've always been international traders. It is like some enemy is trying out all the bacteriological weapons in his arsenal until he gets the right mix of results. Who is it? China, Israel, Iran, Russia, Cuba, North Korea? Imagine the profit in launching a devestating plague and being able to sell us the cure?

The answer is: we've only gotten the level of media noise necessary to notice these things recently. Killer outbreaks happen constantly throughout recorded history, the names of the diseases change but the fact of them goes back to Babylon and before. The difference is we now find out about disease "rampaging" on the other side of the planet.

Then of course there's the medias love affair with sensationalism. Everything has to be a big deal. Notice the end of the very first sentence of this article "could well surpass last year's record level." West Nile's only been here a couple of years, last year was the first time it went national, but they make it sound like it's been here a long time and things were especially bad last year and going to get even worse. The truth is West Nile hasn't even been in America long enough to get a baseline for judging the severity of an outbreak. Oh but we're going to break the record this year. In the meantime 164 out of 280,000,000 people have this disease, take a close look at those numbers and really understand the threat.

West Nile isn't new it's just new to America, AIDS is a rather prolonged discussion but suffice it to say that it's definitely not new though what it was before is still undecided", Mad Cow is a VERY old disease and there still hasn't been any compelling evidence that it jumped species, SARS was primarily a problem with socialized medicine and poor quarantine practices, pox jump species from rodents ALL the time. Really if you dig a little you can see there's nothing below the surface of these things, it's media overhype of pretty normal outbreaks.