Viruses for Dummies
28th May 2026
Over this past week, we’ve been subjected to a flurry of pandemic warnings. It’s like the disease of the day: Bird flu, novavirus, m-pox, hantavirus, slap rash (did you miss that one?), and Ebola. A former director of the CDC just warned that this Ebola outbreak could become a pandemic.
It sounds scary but that is literally impossible for reasons I will explain. My hope is that this article will allow you to know this too. My point is to rescue basic knowledge of infectious disease that every person knew in my grandmother’s generation. The postwar period put huge emphasis on this in schooling. It was called public health in those days.
They knew much more than certified experts today.