New Scientist 05 April 2008Magazine issue 2650
Deborah MacKenzie writes : for years we have been warned that a pandemic is coming. It could be flu, it could be something else. We know that lots of people will die. As terrible as this will be, on an ever more crowded planet, you can't help wondering whether the survivors might be better off in some ways. Wouldn't it be easier to rebuild modern society into something more sustainable if, perish the thought, there were fewer of us. Yet would life ever return to something resembling normal after a devastating pandemic? Virologists sometimes talk about their nightmare scenarios - a plague like ebola or smallpox - as "civilisation ending". Surely they are exaggerating. Aren't they? See Deborah's article in the library and William Reville's comment at http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/sciencetoday/2008/0508/1210178027944.html
