It's the Final Countdown, dadadadah dadadadadaaah

Today I had the honour of attending a talk on 'Avian Flu' (H5N1 influenza) It's been worrying the media for sometime that this 'Bird Flu' might wipe out the human race in a horrifying pandemic that would sweep the globe, annhilating civillisation as we know it. 'Worrying' in this case meaning 'Cheering up' as peddling stories of doom and gloom sells newspapers.

However, while these tales of apocalypse are always a giggle over your average Daily Mail reader's tea and racism they have the disadvantage of being utterly untrue. The talk I went to revealed the truth about Bird Flu - there is a chance it could mutate to spread more effectively (167 dead in the last 3 years is not much of a success rate) there is also a chance that it won't do that for yonks, or even at all. Begin stockpiling candles, bottled water and barbed wire, quick!

Even if Bird Flu were to start killing people off in such a situation, the estimates for the dead run
at 400,000 in the UK. Gosh, you might think (if you censor your thoughts, most of us probably heading down the route of "Holy fucking hell, that's a whole lotta stiffs") That's a lot of dead
people. But that's only 0.67 ish percent.


Artist's Impression of Bird Flu Pandemic

Let's think in terms of numbers. 62,000,000 people died in World War 2 over 6 years. Using my mathematics team, I can tell you that's 155 UK Bird Flu pandemics (So, Daily Mail, shut your pie-hole) If the death rate was roughly the same all over the world, 
40,000,000 or so people would die worldwide, which is 0.67% of the world again. That's a lot of people, but it's not the entire population. Also, it's not going to happen. So shut up.

Interesting fact - if Bird Flu continues to kill at the current rate it'll take about 78,500,000 years to kill us off. Assuming the population stays the same.


In addition, today's Quote of the Day is:

Shadow> what the fuck
Shadow> my moniter just went black
Shadow> then came back on
&Aphrodite> You're lucky
&Aphrodite> I heard normally they never go back

Heh heh. Another from Bash.org.