3.24.2006
Happy Doomsday to You! (WashingtonPost.com)
By Dana Milbank
Friday, March 24, 2006; Page A02
Washington was about one horseman short of an apocalypse yesterday.
It began with a breakfast meeting in a Senate office building where, over fruit salad and bagels, government and academic experts discussed the coming avian flu pandemic. "Currently it has a fatality rate of 56 percent," reported Nancy Cox, flu expert with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "An increasing number of countries have reported human cases. The severe cases are really quite severe."
Pointing to slides of some nasty chest X-rays, she added: "Death from this particular pathogen is not a pleasant death."
Next: the mid-morning news conference on mad cow disease at the National Press Club. There, a beef producer explained why he is suing the government for not letting him test his cattle for bovine spongiform encephalopathy, an "invariably fatal, progressive, incurable, neurodegenerative disease" that can be transmitted to people. The feds say the testing is unnecessary, but the rancher, John Stewart, warned that "BSE is not understood enough today to really come to scientific conclusions."
For those who still had an appetite, there was a luncheon meeting of the National Economists Club at the Chinatown Garden restaurant on H Street, where Congressional Budget Office economist Bob Shackleton was explaining the "high-end" global-warming projections, which have Earth's temperature growing by five degrees Celsius -- nine degrees Fahrenheit -- this century.
"That five degrees centigrade is the equivalent of the change that happened since the end of the last glaciation 18,000 years ago to now," he told the economists as they munched on fortune cookies and orange wedges. "Eighteen thousand years ago, there was a mile of ice over New York City and you could walk 100 miles out into the ocean and still be on land."
Have a nice doomsday? Possibly. When President Bush went to Cleveland on Monday, a questioner asked him about a claim "that members of your administration have reached out to prophetic Christians who see the war in Iraq and the rise of terrorism as signs of the apocalypse. Do you believe this, that the war in Iraq and the rise of terrorism are signs of the apocalypse?"
"I haven't really thought of it that way," the president said. "The first I've heard of that, by the way."
But maybe not the last, if yesterday's collection of end-of-days warnings was any indication.
(More ... Happy Doomsday to You!) ¶ 20:03
Friday, March 24, 2006; Page A02
Washington was about one horseman short of an apocalypse yesterday.
It began with a breakfast meeting in a Senate office building where, over fruit salad and bagels, government and academic experts discussed the coming avian flu pandemic. "Currently it has a fatality rate of 56 percent," reported Nancy Cox, flu expert with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "An increasing number of countries have reported human cases. The severe cases are really quite severe."
Pointing to slides of some nasty chest X-rays, she added: "Death from this particular pathogen is not a pleasant death."
Next: the mid-morning news conference on mad cow disease at the National Press Club. There, a beef producer explained why he is suing the government for not letting him test his cattle for bovine spongiform encephalopathy, an "invariably fatal, progressive, incurable, neurodegenerative disease" that can be transmitted to people. The feds say the testing is unnecessary, but the rancher, John Stewart, warned that "BSE is not understood enough today to really come to scientific conclusions."
For those who still had an appetite, there was a luncheon meeting of the National Economists Club at the Chinatown Garden restaurant on H Street, where Congressional Budget Office economist Bob Shackleton was explaining the "high-end" global-warming projections, which have Earth's temperature growing by five degrees Celsius -- nine degrees Fahrenheit -- this century.
"That five degrees centigrade is the equivalent of the change that happened since the end of the last glaciation 18,000 years ago to now," he told the economists as they munched on fortune cookies and orange wedges. "Eighteen thousand years ago, there was a mile of ice over New York City and you could walk 100 miles out into the ocean and still be on land."
Have a nice doomsday? Possibly. When President Bush went to Cleveland on Monday, a questioner asked him about a claim "that members of your administration have reached out to prophetic Christians who see the war in Iraq and the rise of terrorism as signs of the apocalypse. Do you believe this, that the war in Iraq and the rise of terrorism are signs of the apocalypse?"
"I haven't really thought of it that way," the president said. "The first I've heard of that, by the way."
But maybe not the last, if yesterday's collection of end-of-days warnings was any indication.
(More ... Happy Doomsday to You!) ¶ 20:03
