An excellent piece from Crof at H5N1. It's a must read, I wish I could write even half like that, excerpt from the article but please visit Crof's site for more :
" Floods in a faraway country may seem a bit off topic for a blog created to cover influenza, but the last year and a half has been an education for me: Nothing happens in isolation. Epidemics and pandemics don't wait for a convenient time to break out. They just aggravate everything else that's going on, and everything else aggravates the epidemics.
Everything else is indeed going on. Mike Coston and Arkanoid Legent are reporting tonight on H3N2 flu in Hanoi, and Chen Qi is covering dengue and chikungunya in Karnataka. So bear with me while I think about what's happening to the 170,000,000 million men, women and children in Pakistan.
This is a new country, founded in 1947 in a ghastly act of near-genocidal ethnic cleansing when the British got out of South Asia. But it sits on some of the oldest civilized ground on earth, where people living in mud-brick villages have earned a living from the Indus River for eight or nine thousand years. They have survived untold disasters before, including Alexander the Great, the Mongols, Tamerlane, and the Moghuls.
Modern Pakistan may lack its ancestors' resilience. Its civilian politics seems to depend on two or three aristocratic families, who kill one another off with dreary frequency."
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