Thanks for Reading!

Well, since this is the last day of finals, it's a pretty safe bet this will be the last post for The Plague Strikes Longview! Thanks to everyone for reading and commenting. We'll be back next year with a new campus-wide reading selection.

Some parting thoughts:

Very strange that, as we finish up The Plague this semester, the country is anxiously watching a new kind of plague - swine flu. Of course, there are tons of good resources on swine flu out there. The CDC site and the WHO site (which I consulted frequently for my bubonic plague bibliographies and blog posts) are both thorough, understandable, and frequently updated.

(image at right: 4,298 Confirmed and Probable Cases in 47 States, from the CDC H1N1 Flu site)

But, for whatever reason, I was more interested in this article from the Trentonian newspaper about the 1976 swine flu outbreak in the US. If you have a second, give it a quick read and think about the similarities and differences between three scenarios: Camus's 1940s Oran, the US in the 1970s, and the current global swine flu situation.

Another question raised by Camus and the Trentonian article: What do you do when the cure might be more harmful than the disease? Thankfully, I don't believe we've had to answer that one yet with the current flu, and hopefully we won't have to.

OK - that's all I got! Have a great summer and come see us in the library when you get back. (summer hours here, if you're taking classes...)