“I always found Mother Abigal’s posts interesting.”
Her main interest was following flu threads. The ability to track the global spread of flu using internet news sources was new and she recognized it as a valuable new tool for virus hunters.
Mother Abigail said that she was a retired CDC scientist. Ebola was one of the diseases she had worked on. She predicted that fruit bats would be the animal vector, and that a cave in Kenya would be the epicenter. This was several months before that appeared in the news.
She also believed that we were going to experience a “near-extinction event”. She based this on what happens to animal populations that experience logarithmic growth. Which in her opinion is what the world population has been doing.
So everyone was asking her if Ebola could do that; and she said no, it wasn’t easily transmitted and it killed its victims too quickly.
She said that the big killer would be airborne, and would allow you to spread it around for awhile before you got real sick. Probably a flu, which is why she was focusing on the flu threads. A hybrid flu like the 1918 H1N1 which had avian genes.