If there's one piece to read on the current bird flu pandemic scare, it's this one.
One thing that I was continually reminded by in reading this article is how much of the reason for the growing rampancy of this and other viruses can be attributed to the squalid conditions of the developing countries in which the virus was able to succesively mutate, often across multiple species, unchecked.
In this new era of globalization in which we all now live, where everyone is connected through just a few degrees of separation, the butterfly effect has an important corollary: one man's cough is another man's illness, even if the two are separated by thousands of miles of land and ocean.
When the founders of the United States declared that among man's inalienable rights is the pursuit of "life, liberty
and the pursuit of happiness," they left out the part about access to modern sanitation, clean water supplies, and education about good hygienic practices. Because the less everyone has access to these, the less anyone else can ultimately be reasonably assured they will be able to live at all let alone live happily or freely.
