Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeek!

I was ready for the worst. I had read the papers, after all. I was sure there would be piles of festering corpses in the streets, such as one would expect after a Burundian election. I had read Defoe’s account of the bubonic plague in London, and knew that men with wheelbarrows would be collecting the dead. Especially with today’s littering laws.

Except that, when I had called Violeta every night during the two weeks I was in the US, she always said “What flu?” Ain’t got no flu heah. The schools were shut down, bars closed, everybody hiding from the flu, but they couldn’t find any flu to hide from. My friend Ken, in another town near Guad, reported an equal epidemic of perfect health. It was media flu, he suspected.

Remember the Swine Flu Scare? Oh, wait, that was last week's distraction.