Don’t Worry. Be Happy.


The resistance to the idea that a pandemic could once again sweep the globe is enormous. I hear it every day from skeptics, who, like the residents of New Orleans, maintain `it can’t happen here’.

Whether H5N1 proves to be the culprit or not, we will see another pandemic like 1918. This year, next year, ten years from now . . . it will happen.

For my Floridian and gulf coast friends, let me paint a scenario that you can readily relate to.

It’s August, and for 10 days the National Hurricane Center has been watching a tropical wave as it moved off the coast of Africa and moved westward across the Atlantic. While it has shown brief signs of intensification, it still remains a weak system, and now it sits stationary, 400 miles east of Miami.

The conditions are ripe for development. Warm seawater temperatures, low wind sheer, and the steering currents are weak.

It could, overnight, spin up into a Hurricane. We know that this has happened before. In two days, it could be a CAT 5 storm, headed . . . well, it could go anywhere.

If you live in Miami, what do you do?

Maybe this system never develops, or if it does, perhaps it only ramps up to a Category 1 storm. A nuisance but not a disaster. Even if it does grow immensely strong, it could still turn north and go out to sea. Right now, it’s a potential threat. The amount of warning time you would have, if it decided to intensify and move west is probably 48 hours.

What to do? What to do?

This is precisely where we stand with H5N1.

It’s out there, it has the potential to strike without much warning, and it could be devastating. But… it could also dissipate, or never reach disastrous proportions.

If you’re smart, and live in a hurricane zone, you already have shutters for your windows, two weeks worth of food and bottled water, and an evacuation plan in mind.

If you don’t have the sense God gave a gopher, you are like many of the residents of New Orleans on the Eve of Katrina, woefully unprepared and only hours away from disaster.

Keep on believing it can’t happen here. Ignore history.

Maybe you’ll get lucky.