I’m so sad. I read today that 7,000 people in northern Iraq have cholera and that it could reach Baghdad within a few weeks.
I’m sad because the first thing I thought was “How convenient.”
After all, Bush needs things to calm down in that country and it ain’t happening. His conventional approach has failed. And American soldiers are vaccinated.
I’m a rational person. I’m not prone to paranoia. I’m not even a real cynic. That’s why it freaks me out that it actually occurred to me that the US government might intentionally infect a vulnerable population with a deadly disease in order to weaken their resistance, in order to gain the upper hand in a fucked up war.
We watch this really cool Canadian series called Regenesis, which is all about epidemics and genetic manipulation and bioterrorism and stuff. The setting is this one lab in Toronto full of fancy microbiologists and virologists (including a couple of very sexy doctor dudes) who are called in whenever there’s a weird disease outbreak anywhere in the world. Then they isolate the thingmajig and trace it to its source using its DNA: “This is the strain that was developed in this government lab in Australia in 1995 and subsequently stolen by this mad scientist who then moved to Kazakhstan in 1997, and so it must be this radical group that’s responsible.” Every episode is a high-tech germ whodunit. Very fun.
I just wish somebody would call in Dr. David Sandstrom to look at the bug those Iraqis have…
Whether or not BushCo did it, I don’t know. But I believe they’re capable of it.
And that’s really sad.