shake up the complacent public about the high risk of an imminent, serious pandemic. And I don’t mean the much-publicized swine flu. While the world media has obsessed, and rightfully so, about this fast-spreading illness, I’m worried about the next crisis, something much deadlier and much more catastrophic, indeed the kind of crisis most people wrongly believe could not happen in this day and age. If I were the author, this urgently needed novel would have to be called Plague.

As regular readers of this blog know, I’m generally not a fan of scare tactics. But if Cook has his history of the 14th century Black Death correct–and I think he does–then yeah, maybe the right kind of novel or movie might be necessary to jar us out of our complacency. And if not, well, anyone know where Cook’s well-stocked ski cottage is?

The worst offender was perhaps USA Today. The White House report clearly states—many times, and at one point in big, capital letters—that the scenario it lays out is “a possibility, not a prediction.” Yet, on Monday, the nation’s mostly widely distributed newspaper decided to run the headline, “U.S. report predicts 30,000 to 90,000 deaths from H1N1 deaths.“(The italics are mine.)

A few days ago I woke up to that USA Today story somewhere in Indiana, numb from my cross-country drive back to NY. But that headline sure did jolt me to attention.  I fretted about Swine Flu the rest of the way home. Maybe if the Hampton Inn coffee was stronger I would have been more discerning.

Either way, this is a fascinating post by Carl Zimmer on how scientists used a wiki to collaborate in real time on the swine flu virus and then publish their results a little more than a month later in the journal Nature. The best part: everyone can read the paper, since it was published under a creative commons license.

Given all the hoopla and heady pedictions for Twitter these days, it’s easy to forget the potential of wikis. U.S. spooks realized this a few years ago.

As Zimmer points out, the wiki-enabled swine flu paper

is an anxiety-triggering read.

Yes, but I’m less anxious just knowing that this important new swine flu information is getting out there in advance of the next pandemic wave.

In our lifetimes, or our children’s lifetimes, we will face a broad array of dangerous emerging 21st-century diseases, man-made or natural, brand-new or old, newly resistant to our current vaccines and antiviral drugs. You can bet on it.

Yeesh. Turns out we’re headed for a perfect storm of viral contagion. Brilliant lists bioterror, climate change, overpopulation, and deforestation as threat multipliers.

One big concern, he says, is that humans and wild animals (and their viruses) are living in increasingly tighter quarters, “because there is less rain forest, jungle and wild lands separating” us.

This, he asserts, is exacerbated by global warming.  For example, the loss of agricultural land from sea rise causes

farmers to cut down jungle, creating deforested areas which once served as barriers to the zoonotic viruses that each day have more opportunities to jump from bats and rodents and monkeys and civet cats to humans.

Did you catch that “each day” part? There’s a a chance I might die “each day” too. Still, I get his point. Here’s the rest of that climate change-viral hot house scenario Brilliant envisions:

As temperatures rise and seashores change, animals head inland and to higher ground, moving into heavily populated human areas. Soon there will be human climate refugees on the move into land once thought inhabitable. All of these changes increase the potential for humans and animals to exchange new viruses.

The bottom line, Brilliant says, is that the current swine flu scare is a mild harbinger of what lurks around the corner:

Indeed, we might be entering an Age of Pandemics.

Containing Flu Is Not Feasible, Specialists Say
They Urge a Strategy of Mitigating Effects

How long before we see an identical hed and sub-hed, with just one word change:

Containing Flu Climate Change is Not Feasible, Specialists say

I’m not suggesting, just wondering…

He defined “infodemic” as thus:

A few facts, mixed with fear, speculation and rumor, amplified and relayed swiftly worldwide by modern information technologies, have affected national and international economies, politics and even security in ways that are utterly disproportionate with the root realities. It is a phenomenon we have seen with greater frequency in recent years — not only in our reaction to SARS, for example, but also in our response to terrorism and even to relatively minor occurrences such as shark sightings.

Now, writing in his blog for Foreign Policy magazine, Rothkopf sizes up the latest “infodemic” spawned by the Swine Flu outbreak.  “It is critical,” he writes, “that the media offer information about symptoms, precautions, and the spread of potential epidemics.” That’s his set-up pitch. Then he throws this slider:

But whereas health officials practice how to manage these crises, not only do the vast majority of media never think such matters through, newer “viral” media are all emotion all the time.

Rothkopf seems to be taking aim at two things here: the breathless and endless cable tv news covarge, and the fast mutating variant of a story being tweeted, digged and stumbled upon.

Is there any way around this? Probably not. But he thinks such media contagion can be better managed.

I’ve been trolling around for a one-stop shop that offers virus authority in a readable, lighthearted manner.

Maggie Koerth-Baker to the rescue, courtesy of boingboing.