It Never Really Went Away, You Just Forgot About It

Or that's the explanation over at Slate.com about what happened to the avian flu that everyone was panicked by a few years ago. Pediatrician Sydney Spieisel's account of this is here.. On the one hand, it's lazy of me to just let him tell it, but on the other, you know he knows a lot more about this than I do.

Now that swine flu has reared its ugly head, we are thinking once again about deadly flus. But if it peters out, and I certainly hope it does, we will all put it on the back burners of our minds again.

Luckily for us, sometimes the organizational aspect of society works a little differently than our own small brains--in other words, our collective mind isn't so easily diverted by the next new thing. Many things have been thought through by the health care professionals while we as individuals forgot about this--things like how to distribute anti-viral medicines on a mass scale and how and when to impose a quarantine. So, as a result of the avian flu scare, we are better prepared to deal with a pandemic than we would have been otherwise.


Here's hoping you don't get any of these scary flus. And by the way--Gesundheit!

Past Continuous

At times I feel that of my several blogs, this is the one that ends up languishing on the vine. But in the past couple of weeks I've had several great ideas for topics. Great, because none of them involve a whole lot of work on my part!

I've been following Sucharita Sarkar's constantly thought-provoking blog Past Continuous for awhile now, though it is in some ways the opposite of this one--it's all about memory. But her latest post brings the two themes together: Her question to us all is "Do you remember when you first forgot something?" You can answer her question here.

Or I suppose I should say, you can try to. Remembering about forgetting is, I find, a slippery proposition.