An Age of Plagues

There is time enough in the world to deal with the rise and fall of the sea. There is time enough in the world to work out a way to cope with desertification or coastal erosion.

But what about Drug Resistant plagues?

Will there be enough time?

The thing to keep in mind about plagues is that their behavior in the wild is that they infect at an exponential rate, not an additive rate. In other words, damn fast.

Here is how it will start. (From an AP article at Yahoo.)

Then came the fevers. They bathed and chilled the skinny frame of Oswaldo Juarez, a 19-year-old Peruvian visiting to study English. His lungs clattered, his chest tightened and he ached with every gasp. During a wheezing fit at 4 a.m., Juarez felt a warm knot rise from his throat. He ran to the bathroom sink and spewed a mouthful of blood.

I'm dying, he told himself, "because when you cough blood, it's something really bad."

Oswaldo is lucky. Well, that may or may not be so. If he has a relapse, he could end up starting a wild fire.

We may come to a point in our near future where the grim fate of Prince Prospero will be less the stuff of fables then a dark reality.