Or was this post meant as associative poetry? If so, your scansion sucks, dude.

Or, the bird flu will affect many, in a devastating type way.

markets have turned the developing world into slave states.

It's the genetic mixture of avian bird flue with more typical human flu in a resistance-compromised population, which is then transmitted worldwide, killing ...

BILLIONS.

Yes, that was the correct word.

Okay, I'm thinking of the global impacts right now. I'm picturing hundreds of thousands of dead African, Indians, Latinos and Asians heaped in villages and slums all over the world, their rotting corpses surrounded by clouds of flies and carrion birds who don't realize they're killing themselves as they tear gobbets of lymph-spattered flesh from the bloated corpses of the Third World.

Thinking of it... thinking of it... thinking of it... and still, weirdly enough, not one fucking iota less likely to happen. What would be required to stop it? The mobilization of tens of billions of dollars in grant money and a sea change in the structure of global capitalism. What are the other projects waiting in line for that kind of shift? Remedies for climate change, AIDS, global labor reform, water treatment, land use reform and so on.

And none of those projects, some of which impact the developed world pretty directly, have enough traction to create such a sea change. But here you are, chiming in with Charles in his endless pissing and moaning about how his perspective on the plight of the third world is special and magical because he used to live there, and how relentlessly ignorant the rest of us are because we never did. Yadda yadda yadda, everybody come running because Charles smells smoke and smoke means fire and that's trouble with a capitol T which rhymes with P and that spells ePidemic!

...all of which is to say, basically, that you're a cunt. And so's Charles.

As @12 points out, an influenza pandemic, like raw sewage, will be the great social equalizer.

oh, wait, she is.

never mind.

OBVIOUSLY epidemics, droughts, hurricanes, and catastrophes of every kind are hardest on those who have least to lose.

Please explain how this makes it mere entertainment for those who are better off to be concerned for themselves.