Bird Flu

You can tell I'm not very busy at work today :-D Another entry!

Been reading Boris Johnson's blog (http://www.boris-johnson.com) and found an entry about Ken Livingston the London mayor. Apparently he is spending £1m of the congestion charge raised on 100,000 doses of anti chicken flu medication....They have drawn up a list of "elite" figures, mainly government ministers and BBC high-ups, who would be required to keep the country going in the event of the chicken plague, and who must therefore receive free doses of the wonderdrug.

He says "What drives me mad is not that I am excluded from this list (opposition politicians, you will not be surprised to learn, are thought to be dispensable to the running of Britain), but that we are getting in a flap about a chicken disease which has killed a grand total of 57 human beings since it was detected in 2003, most of them Asian owners of fighting-cocks who chose to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to their spifflicated birds.

To get these figures in proportion, you should know that nine million people are suffering from tuberculosis, of which two million will die in the next year, and half a billion people are suffering from malaria. So why are we scaring ourselves witless about this Asian fowl pest? "

Well said Boris and what a scandalous waste of money. It seems that they have picked up on the media-panic about chicken flu and are convinced it's going to wipe out the globe. Like the SUDAN-1 scare - it made me piss myself laughing to see people so scared of eating a Pot Noodle or a curry "in case I get cancer", then they carry on with their 50-a-day habit and their cancer causing unhealthy lifestyles. But the media once again created the panic, and we drank it in like George Best.

Diseases such as malaria and TB are such a part of our everyday vocabulary that we ignore the millions of deaths caused by it. There is no scandal, no glamour, no frontpage news to be had about it, and because it doesn't really affect us Brits then once again we close our eyes to it.