Is this pestilence, or just a preview?

The swine flu -- hasn't gone away. It's infecting people around the world, and because it's new, it's transmissible. I.e., if you get exposed, you'll probably get it. Fortunately, it doesn't seem like it's much of a killer; that is scant comfort for the families of someone who has died from it.

Swine flu spreads to 73 countries with over 25,000 infected (this was as of June 8, which was ten days ago; I'm a little slow on this one)

Here's a sobering update with newer numbers:


What can we learn from past pandemics? "Flu viruses can change quickly, but at the moment the WHO says that swine flu is roughly as contagious as seasonal flu. As of 15 June 2009, 35,928 people worldwide had been confirmed to have swine flu by laboratory tests." (10,000 more in a couple days less than two weeks, assuming the June 8 article was written with numbers a couple of days old)

Back in the beginning of this blog, I posted on the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse; one of them is Pestilence. Because the swine flu (in its current form) is not much of a threat, it doesn't seem to be as dangerously pestilential as one of the horsemen would be feared to be. But what it does show is that in a world with lots of people and extraordinarily fast transportation between what once were far-flung corners of the world, something easily transmissible spreads extraordinarily fast -- and that would be a trait of true Pestilence. As it is, the relatively slow spread due to fairly good response from world governments (and who says that international organizations are a BAD thing?) is giving the world time to develop a vaccine.

The other problem with Pestilence is deviousness. Flu is notorious for grabbing new DNA and incorporating it into its threat matrix. Bird flu is still out there -- and a hybrid would not give sweet dreams to the people at CDC or WHO.