Pandemic?

Tenshinai
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DDHvi wrote:

Sierra Leone (MNN) — This week, the World Health Organization declared the end of the Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone.



From:

https://www.mnnonline.org/news/sierra-l ... ally-over/

There is still a lot of clean up work to do on the consequences of the Ebola epidemic. Note that some people in the medical profession are stating that sooner or later we will have a world wide pandemic of some sort, like the flu was a century ago. Communications can help - no infections spread (except bad ideas) over the net, and we can be warned to take precautions.



The downside addition to that is of course that modern communications also includes regular airplane flights to and from almost anywhere and everywhere.

Meaning that we can have a worldwide pandemic in less than a week after the first case is found.

The potential is extremely nasty.

Unfortunately, I don't see an argument against this. If the disease is easily spread, and not obvious before others can be affected! On this, there was a concern about the plague outbreak on Madagascar. It may be waning, I hope. There are other possibilities, such as the Marburg virus.

Christopher Anvil's "The Steel, the Mist, and the Blazing sun is worth reading, and shows a future partly based on such a scenario.

The quarantine method suggested at the end of the book is quite interesting to SF fans.

Frank Herbert's "The White Plague" in 1982 had this topic covered. The plague killed every woman it reached.
John Ringo recently had a series where the plague reduced any human that caught it to about the intelligence and ferocity of a wild dog.

IIRC, the book Executive Orders by Tom Clancy had an artificial Ebola-variant pandemic which President Ryan managed to stop via (legally questionable) martial law and lockdown (no interstate travel, for example). How easy this would be to instigate in real life is questionable, but given the slapdash approach to safety that religious nuts have (Preacher Abu Hamza became a Mullah because he didn't listen to instructions in his bomb-making class and when his explosives started to fizz, he grabbed the tray and ran outside with it rather than leaving it and skedaddling... the twit. The resulting explosion cost him his hands and one eye), any who try are more likely to die of the disease than get it to a point where it can be deployed.

Another plague book is The Last Centurion by John Ringo. While there's quite a bit of "America, fuck yeah!" in it, the notes on how high-trust societies (such as the UK, the USA, Australia etc) would cope as compared to low-trust societies (if they ain't family, you can't trust them) are quite thought-provoking. The use of border control to reduce the spread of the disease is also quite well-conceived.

Of course, most Plague Books tend to start after the plague had removed 90%+ of the world's population, making them ineligable for inclusion in this thread...

The Blizzard game World of Warcraft has twice been the source of pandemic research. Once, entirely by accident, a section of the game where a boss was, due to a coding glitch, spread a plague from a remote area into the whole game landscape. The second time a deliberate zombie plague was unleashed.

Both events were studied by the CDC and other pandemic research groups.