Some thing to pay attention to, considering the worries about Avian Flu:
Ten people have died from a mystery viral outbreak at a Toronto nursing home and another 40 are in hospital, public health officials said on Tuesday as they raced to contact anyone who visited the home recently.
The outbreak, an unidentified respiratory virus, has sparked memories of the SARS outbreak two years ago that killed 44 people in Canada’s largest city.
But health officials said the latest outbreak, which was first detected on September 25, is under control although they warned that more deaths could be expected.
Four new deaths were added to the toll on Tuesday, all of them elderly residents at the Seven Oaks Home for the Aged. All of the dead were aged between 50 years to 95 years.
Remember, this is Pandemic Flu Awareness Week:

Mr Furious
Yikes.
TallDave
I doubt we’ll ever see a flu pandemic anything like the one around WW I. People forget how much poorer and stupider everyone was back then.
I’m laying my bets on an engineered virus from a secret lab staffed with some sort of religious/political wackos. Something easily transmitted, with a long incubation time and a 99% fatality rate. I expect it will kill upwards of a billion people in the couple months it will take the desperate, concerted efforts of civilization to find a cure.
And then the survivors will all have a good laugh about how we used to worry about people with box cutters on airplanes.
ChristieS
Hmmm, I’ve been following this for just shy of two years. What’s a bit more immediate in our lives is that our President wants the power to mobilize our armed forces to enforce a large quarantine area, say, the size of California, in our own country.
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-bush-birdflu.html
Sorry for the long URL. It’s been so long since I’ve posted a link here that I’ve forgotten how.
Krista
You’ve been reading The Stand again, haven’t you?
KCinDC
I saw that “PFAW” in the URL for the link and thought you were linking to something affiliated with People for the American Way.