Tuesday, October 20, 2009

A Coming Pandemic?

This isn't pleasant reading. In Foreign Policy, novelist and physician Robin Cook discusses the danger of a new plague. An excerpt:

At that point, the story moves quickly as the deadly new agent races around the planet, thumbing its nose at all vain attempts to stop or contain it. Governments and individuals will do desperate things, some rational and others not so, like deploying the military to try to close borders or using firearms to keep possibly infected strangers at bay. Hospitals will be overwhelmed at first and later forced to lock their doors. To avoid interpersonal contact, people will hole up in their homes, causing government offices, schools, and businesses to close. Many public officials will be forced to quarantine themselves from a diseased population and retreat to undisclosed locations, which will only fuel the public panic. Riot police in biohazard suits (if there are even enough to go around) will increasingly be called upon to beat back waves of sick, scared, and helpless civilians, desperate for food, water, and medicine. This won't just be the case in failing states like Somalia and Yemen, but also in successful ones like France and the United States.

2 comments:

Dan Richwine said...

And then, the surviving remnants make their way to Denver, in the case of the good, and Las Vegas, in the case of the evil, to each make their "Stand" in their own ways.

Someone should write a book about this. It would be a King of a bestseller, and maybe a TV movie as well...

Michael Wade said...

Dan,

Ha!

I think Robin Cook is already writing it, but I bet it's shorter than The Stand.