So the newest scare is upon us.This time it’s the birds who’ll be coming to get us. After sheep, bees and cows, it’s about time for the birds to be trying their luck with ending human civilization. And the media helps us in explaining just where the battle man against bird stands at the time, while governments are doing just exactly what makes common sense when they send out experts in allbody dresses whenever a dead bird is reported anywhere within a few hundred kilometers of any known cases of the Avian Flue. It’s just as professional as it wasfor them to ask us to stop the car and walk through some chemicals whenever we were passing some border line during the heydays of the Mouth-and-Hoof disease (whenever someone goes to a farm, it’s very likely that he’ll wear the same shoes as he will wear when he takes an airplane some days later, right?).
As far as I’ve heard, altogether three cats have so far managed to contract the virus — and that was on the Island where it was first found (Rügen). Now I’ve seen quite a number of pictures of cats eating various small birds in newspapers all across Europe after that, and the number of headline stories about how to avoid getting it yourself have risen immensely as well. Alone on that island, the German military collected 3000 dead birds. Frightening? Well, not if you consider, that under 20% of those found had the virus, and only a small percentage of those actually died of it. (On the 21st of February, when they had found 1000 dead birds, the number of infected cases was 79 — while the north-eastern part of the island houses 69,000 wild birds and altogether 400,000 chicken live on the entire island). And while world wide there have been no cases of cat to human transmissions yet, the German army was granted the right to use a Tornado fighter jet in order to find more bird carcases — of course without result — as one couldn’t tell the difference between dead and alive birds on the pictures they shot! In Russia, Deputy Speaker of the national parliament Vladimir Zhirinovsky is reported to have suggested to arm all males between Sochi and Crimea (both at the Black Sea) in order to stop the yearly bird migration to and from Turkey.
Ts, ts, what can I say? Maybe this is a good time to go out and waste a lot of money on yourself at the mall — you know you might not live to see tomorrow.