Just A Case Of The Flu?
Robert Paul Reyes
March 21, 2006
When I was a kid bacteria and viruses peacefully coexisted with humans. As a child I didn't fear germs -- worst they could do was give me a case of the sniffles.
I played in the mud, swam in filthy ponds, picked up pennies from the gutter and when I came home, my mom would scold me, not for being riddled with germs, but for tracking mud into her freshly polished kitchen floor.
But in the past few decades it seems that nature has unleashed a horde of exotic and dangerous bugs: Mad Cow Disease, Flesh-eating virus, Ebola, HIV, BSE, SARS -- the list is endless.
Even the flu poses the threat of a pandemic of Biblical proportions -- the bird flu is scarier than anything Alfred Hitchcock ever dreamed of.
We are being invaded by killers that we can't see, they do their diabolical mischief right under our feeble eyes.
The peaceful coexistence that we enjoyed with nature is but a distant memory, we arm ourselves against our implacable enemy with prescription drugs, vaccines, serums and antibiotics.
Michael Jackson has a plethora of eccentric tics, but wearing latex gloves at all hours of the day and night is not one of them.
It seems we are living in a science fiction nightmare -- antibiotics are ineffectual and vaccines are unavailable.
I've come down with a case of the sniffles, and my mom is no longer around to fix me some warm soup, there's only the birds gathering outside my bedroom window, precariously balanced on the electrical wires.
I played in the mud, swam in filthy ponds, picked up pennies from the gutter and when I came home, my mom would scold me, not for being riddled with germs, but for tracking mud into her freshly polished kitchen floor.
But in the past few decades it seems that nature has unleashed a horde of exotic and dangerous bugs: Mad Cow Disease, Flesh-eating virus, Ebola, HIV, BSE, SARS -- the list is endless.
Even the flu poses the threat of a pandemic of Biblical proportions -- the bird flu is scarier than anything Alfred Hitchcock ever dreamed of.
We are being invaded by killers that we can't see, they do their diabolical mischief right under our feeble eyes.
The peaceful coexistence that we enjoyed with nature is but a distant memory, we arm ourselves against our implacable enemy with prescription drugs, vaccines, serums and antibiotics.
Michael Jackson has a plethora of eccentric tics, but wearing latex gloves at all hours of the day and night is not one of them.
It seems we are living in a science fiction nightmare -- antibiotics are ineffectual and vaccines are unavailable.
I've come down with a case of the sniffles, and my mom is no longer around to fix me some warm soup, there's only the birds gathering outside my bedroom window, precariously balanced on the electrical wires.
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