[Lazamataz]

She was a retired CDC scientist who studied fun stuff like Ebola and the other hemorrhagic fevers. In fact we learned from her that fruit bats would be the reservoir for Ebola, long before that fact hit the news wires. Anyway influenza was also one of her interests. It may have been her major interest. She was following and mapping any reported outbreaks. She told us that recombinant animal/human flus are extremely dangerous, capable of inflicting a near-extinction event. So when you hear “avian flu” or “swine flu” pay attention, those are the flus that she was warning about. The 1918 Flu was one such flu. It likely started in rural western Kansas and spread across the globe with our soldiers. It killed more people than World War One.

During the Ebola scare, I called a friend down in Infectious Diseases (I was a long-term Federal contractor for the CDC), and I asked him, "Is ebola the threat the press makes it out to be?"

He laughed and replied "No!"

I expressed relief and was about to hang up, when he said, "However...."

I listened.

"However, if you want nightmares, I have one for you. China is presently trying to weaponized H7N9, the very deadly bird flu. They are trying to make it easily human-spread, and it has a mortality rate of 30%. That means 1/3 of the population of the world will die, if this thing goes airborne. Devastating to society. We'd probably collapse into a global third-world status, which would kill many more."

I gasped. He went on:

"We've been BEGGING them not to play with this dangerous bug, but they won't listen."

Yeah, I had some nightmares after that conversation.

[Pelham]

I should have pinged you, I thought that I remembered you had worked with CDC.

If I understand the CDC types, Ebola and its cousins are really scary but they don’t transmit all that easily. Not even a fraction as good as airborne influenza.

A naturally recombinant bird flu would be a major crowd killer. Helping it along by weaponizing it is a good way to give the Earth back to nature. Crichton used that scenario in one of his novels, but his culprits were environmental crazies instead of inscrutable Chinese. He picked on the enviros because some of those lunatics were kicking the idea around in their own writings.