Vintage Diseases Making a Comeback

An anonymous reader writes "MSNBC has a piece on a recent resurgence in some old-timey diseases. Mumps, Whooping Cough, and Rickets are making a comeback, back in style like it's 1955." From the article: "Public-health officials certainly weren't expecting to get 'bitten' by mumps this year. Although the virus has been circulating in British kids since 2000, it hadn't caused much trouble in the United States since an outbreak in Kansas 18 years ago. The Midwest is the epicenter again, but the victims are primarily college students, not children. Once a childhood disease, the virus has now taken hold in university towns. That's partly because crowded dorms and cafeterias are breeding grounds for germs that are spread by sneezing and coughing."

Comments

Re:Innoculations?

[SeaFox]

Oh! Dammit! I forgot to say First Post! And for once I actually got it.

No one posted the obvious pop-culture reference?

[kimvette]

Remember this Brady Bunch episode?

Stay realistic

[Opportunist]

Terror only works if you manage to "inform" the victim that they're attacked. What's terror good for if there's no panic? Panic is one of the key goals of terror.

Imagine 911 would have gone unnoticed. Ok, hard to do, but let's imagine. 3000 people dead. Now, if you take gunfights, accidents and all those other opportunities to loose your life prematurely into account, you get a WAY higher number when you only count the deaths of a year, in the US alone.

And it's not like Al Quaida blew up a building per month, now did they?

Now, while it was certainly quite unpleasant, if you only take the body count into account, it was not really something to write home about.

So what's the big deal about it? The big deal is that an outside force attacked the USA. That's it, in a nutshell. And that's what created the panic. Not that people died. Not that 2 (actually a few more) buildings crumbled. But that some outsider could do it.

Now imagine nobody would've noticed. Imagine Al Quaida wouldn't have stood up and said "Yeah, it's us over here. We did it." It would've been brushed off as the actions of some loonatics. Clever loonatics. Well prepared loonies, but loonies.

So what is a bio attack good for if there's no panic? It's not like you can kill a sizable portion of the US population that way. At least not enough to actually cause any weakening of its. commercial or military power. If any place, such a "sneaky" attack would have to occur to its military forces. But a civilian attack without an accompanying message to create the panic is pointless.