“Epidemiologists have warned that the next pandemic could sicken one in every three people on the planet,” reported Scientific American in its October 25 report, “Preparing for a Pandemic.”

The article continued: “The disease would spare no nation, race or income group. There would be no certain way to avoid infection.”
In its cover story the same week, Newsweek reported that the “key factors that will determine success are surveillance, the authority to impose and enforce a quarantine, the availability of vaccines and antiviral drugs, and the state of readiness in hospitals–and in almost all of these, the world has a long way to go.” (The Fight Against the Flu, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9787849/site/newsweek/page/2/).
Sounding vaguely anthropomorphic, a related article in Newsweek concluded: “our fate will be decided in a race between the virus’s inherent lethality and the tendency of all germs to evolve toward a less deadly form because their own spread depends on not killing the host–us–too quickly.”