AIDS was the start, for me. When I was very young, there was a diet product called Aids. That made sense – it was an aid. AIDS didn’t sound that bad at first. Maybe that was the idea, like asking people to leave a smoke-filling auditorium in a ‘quiet and orderly fashion’. Whatever you do, don’t yell, “Fire!”
At some point, naming things – from consumer products to epidemics – became a bit of a laugh. I won’t bore you with lists that you can well draw up yourselves.
And now we have swine flu.
It is influenza, that much is for sure. But it has never been passed from pig to pig, much less pig to human. It has, clearly, spread from human to human, apparently beginning in Mexico.
For all the sense it makes, it may as well have been called rat flu.
Maybe that’s been reserved for the next one.
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