An ounce of prevention

It's interesting to me that what they call the 100 year flood in my area has occurred like 5 or 6 times, that I know of, in my life time and I'm not 5 or 6 hundred years old. I've often pondered the shock people must feel as basements are filling with water and they are counting backward to the LAST 100 year flood. Why don't they rename it and prepare for it. It isn't rocket science how it happens. One very warm day the snow melts up the canyon or it rains heavily and the water takes the exact same path it always has. I am not certain whose grand idea it was/is to keep building in the path of the flood, but they do. However a couple years back they started widening out the creek and shoring up the sides and digging reservoirs a long the way. I hasn't been 100 years yet so we've yet to see if an ounce of prevention was worth it. (MHO it will be)
So in February 2004 an avian influenza was detected in birds in Vietnam. It was a virus that crossed over to humans and had a much lower toll than projected. It also hasn't been classified as a pandemic because they haven't found it to be sustained and efficient enough of a virus to be passed from human to human. Every known case was passed from a bird to a human. My husband came in as I was writing this and we were talking about the difference between an epidemic, pandemic, and endemics. Plagues, viruses, influenza, fevers, etc. He told me that the hospital corporation he works for had been preparing for the SARS pneumonia outbreak which was stopped by nation and international health authorities before it could become pandemic. Preparation for this sort of thing is what the GOP stripped from the stimulus as unnecessary spending. God forbid they look at it and say "yeah our country's health is important." An ounce of prevention...
So now we have an outbreak of an influenza virus that has been named Swine Flu. It sounds like a very frightening and real threat because of the death toll in such a short span. And not to make light of a serious thing, but just as the Avian Flu conjured scenes from Hitchcock's movie "The Birds", Swine Flu sounds like something you'd pick up from the spittle spray of Rush Limbaugh's mouth as he rants incoherently.
I wondered how this one was going to be pinned on President Obama, but the GOP is going to need to hire the Brothers Bush Fairytale author's to explain that while bitching and fussing and mocking the wasteful government spending stimulus money on such trivial things as flu epidemics and Jindal who joked "They want to spend stimulus money on volcano monitoring? Why everyone knows that the Hill Witch keeps tabs on our volcanoes by floating chicken bones in her own intestinal ichor!" It was stripped from the stimulus by the GOP as well. Oops! My bad. The Hill Witch must have taken her eyes off of Russia long enough to miss the eruption of Alaska's Mount Redoubt (ironic name). Now I'm not going to suggest that it takes a bunch of superstitious Republicans to believe that there is a guaranteed 100 years between floods, volcanic eruptions, and diseases of mass destruction. Okay.. Yes I am. I mean, for real, Sarah Palin didn't know how fruit flies are used in DNA research. And I live in Utah. The only thing more prevalent than prairie dogs here are Republicans.

Oh, and my mother's oldest brother died of Rocky Mountain Spotted fever when he was 12. He contracted it from a prairie dog that he had trapped in their cattle field. If a cow steps into a prairie dog hole, it can break it's leg and have to be put down. Times have changed and much can be prevented. It just takes people willing to talk to people who study these things. A president can't be expected to be everywhere all the time. He can't stop natural disasters, viral outbreaks, or unnecessary lives lost to a war dreamed up to benefit corrupt politicians. But he can listen and he can learn. Sadly President Obama is having to listen to people who can help us AND people who talk out of their butts.