A bunch of great stuff in today’s NYT, but two pieces hit home:

Living for Today, Locked in a Paralyzed Body is about Lou Gherig’s disease patients, euthanasia, and those that choose to live with a respirator. One doc featured in the article has an excellent quote: “Happiness is reality divided by expectations.”

The Flu Hunters is the cover story in the Sunday magazine, all about avian bird flu, pandemics, and how experts are worried we’re biding our time until the avian bird flu in Asia gains human-to-human infectious ability, and “SARS will look like a vacation.” There’s a nice primer on influenza about halfway down into the article, and the picture at the top of the article is worth a click itself. (And it mentions Promed-Mail , a site that updates frequently with infectious disease reports.)

The Spanish flu of 1918, the largest pandemic (pandemic is an infection across the entire world) of the 20th century, killed between 20 and 50 million people worldwide, and 500,000 in the US alone. It was the only year, since 1900, that the US population actually shrunk .

I <3 Huckabees teaches us the same lesson: we’re all connected. But in the world of infectious disease, that’s a bad thing. My health can affect you, and your health can affect me. If you don’t support health care for all for any other reason, support it for your own self-interest. If someone doesn’t have health insurance, they’re less likely to go to a doctor or the ER, and more likely to hope the illness will just go away. And in the case of a flu pandemic in the US, that’s time we can’t afford to waste.

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