"Come Fly With Me" The next pandemic will fly Boeing or Airbus!

Just do the math. You have a dozen people ill with a new human to human pandemic - that has at least a 24 hour period before the host dies - who board a flight in Rome with 300 fellow fliers. They fly to Paris where 288 people get on flights for 20 different cities in US, Canada, Europe, South America. 288 new people get on board for a flight to Kennedy in NYC. There 100 people catch trains for a variety of destinations in Greater New Work and 200 catch flights for 40 different US cities with at least 100 people on each of those flights. Gets scary, quick, eh?

clipped from switchboard.nrdc.org Keeping tabs on Dengue Fever: Stay tuned Kim Knowlton But one infectious disease in particular is on my mind today: Dengue Fever. I just learned about 22 confirmed cases of Dengue (“breakbone”) Fever that people acquired in Key West, Florida in the summer and fall of 2009. This may not sound like a lot, but these were the first locally-transmitted infections in Florida in more than 40 years. Recurring rains reportedly allowed dengue-carrying mosquitoes to thrive in Key West. Since then, even more dengue cases have been “imported” back into the state by infected travelers returning to Florida.