Sounds like a civilisation terminating event once AH5N1 bird flu virus goes airborne, no more iphones, no more laptops, no more governments, no more gasoline, just a very bad smell everywhere and a sudden quietness once the weeping and gnashing of teeth stop, oh the humanity!
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/27/science/debate-persists-on-deadly-flu-made-airborne.html?_r=1&pagewanted=2
The A(H5N1) bird flu was first recognized in Hong Kong in 1997, when chickens in poultry markets began dying and 18 people fell ill, 6 of them fatally. Hoping to stamp out the virus, the government in Hong Kong destroyed the country’s entire poultry industry — killing more than a million birds — in just a few days. Buddhist monks and nuns in Hong Kong prayed for the souls of the slaughtered chickens, and world health officials praised Hong Kong for averting a potential pandemic.
But the virus persisted in other parts of Asia, and reached Europe and Africa; that worries scientists, because most bird flus emerge briefly and then vanish. Millions of infected birds have died, and many millions more have been slaughtered. Since 1997, about 600 humans have been infected, and more than half died.
Dr. Donald A. Henderson, a leader in the eradication of smallpox and now a biosecurity expert at the University of Pittsburgh, noted that even the notorious flu pandemic of 1918 killed only 2 percent of patients.
“This is running at 50 percent or more,” Dr. Henderson said. “This would be the ultimate organism as far as destruction of population is concerned.”
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