[Dog Gone]

From the NY Times:

In another rare step, the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention activated its emergency operations center in Atlanta, including sophisticated communications technology, to enhance its ability to coordinate information from other countries and to investigate any suspect cases in this country.

C.D.C. has used the operations center only twice before, for the mosquito-borne West Nile fever epidemic last year and the anthrax attacks in 2001. The last time it issued a global health alert was in 1993, to enhance measures to control tuberculosis. W.H.O. officials said they could not recall the last time an emergency global travel advisory was issued.

[Movemout]

That is a very significant piece of news, how unusual for the NY Times. This clearly has the forensics community in an uproar. A pandemic version of the flu has been discussed for years. Let me see now, at a 40% infection rate that would be roughly 2.5 billion infections and at a 2.5% mortality rate, that would be 6.25 million deaths. Time to invest in flowers, caskets, and mortuaries (tongue in cheek). Hospitals couldn't handle this load under any circumstances that I can imagine. The impact on the economy would be as devastating as the disease itself were it to come to pass.