George Bush and I have been reading the same book

How weird is that?

The following is an excerpt from an article I found online about bird flu:

"Katrina hit just days after Bush finished John M. Barry's The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History during his August vacation on his ranch, White House spokesman Scott McClellan says.

Apparently motivated by the frightening tale of the 1918 epidemic, which killed an estimated 150,000 people in the USA and 50 million worldwide, Bush said last week that the military might be needed to enforce quarantines."

Members of my immediate family will no doubt remember when I read The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History. Not a conversation was held that I didn't refer to it. I was so obsessed by it that I started to annoy my co-workers also, randomly throwing bits of info into lunch conversations. ("Did you know that 1918 flu pandemic targeted the young and healthy rather than the elderly and infirm?" "It's estimated that as many as 50 million people died during the 1918 flu outbreak." "Doctors were unable to identify the ethnicity of many corpses, due to the fact that victims' skin tended to turn completely blue.")

I'm afraid I may have become a bit tiresome on the subject. But now that the President has read the book, I feel better. Because let me tell you, anyone who reads this book will be extremely alarmed about the possibility of a bird flu pandemic and will want to do something to prevent it, immediately.

I think two factors are key to my own interest in the book, and avian flu in general. First of all, I am a hypochondriac. Yes, it's true! I know you don't believe it, and argue if you'd like, but the fact remains that I spend a good deal of my life wondering if some seemingly mild ailment, like an infected cuticle, will spread and turn into a life-threatening disease. Second of all, there's the bird factor. You all know how I feel about birds. As far as I'm concerned, the only good bird is a dead bird. So it seems fitting somehow that I would ultimately be felled by a disease brought to us by birds. In fact, a part of me suspects that the only reason bird flu is becoming an issue is because the birds are attempting yet again to find a way to kill me.

Would an entire species spend their evolutionary cycle developing a deadly influenza virus that could be transmitted to me? Yes, I think they would.