Some of the teams culling birds in India in the bird flu outbreak that I mentioned a couple of days ago are now quitting because of corruption in the villages. They report that local politicians are trying to force them to report ten times as many cullings as are done, so that villages can be paid more compensation by the national government, which the politicians will then pocket.

Some of the teams have also stopped working due to exhaustion.
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There hasn’t been much bird flu news recently, and I’m just as happy about that as it’s more fun to be writing about “I Am Legend” than it is about actual plagues that are killing actual birds (and sometimes humans).

However, there is unfortunately some new bird flu news. India is seeing a significant outbreak of bird flu, affecting 13 of West Bengal’s 19 districts. The government says that more than 2.5 million birds will have to be put to death.

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And I don’t mean the kind you hitch to your car (although that could be pretty cool).

No, this is the theatrical trailer for Neil Marshall’s new film “Doomsday”. Marshall’s previous credits are “Dog Soldiers” and “The Descent”

The story goes that in 2008 a plague spreads rapidly in Scotland; to save the world, Scotland is quarantined and basically written off as dead; forgotten about. 25 years later the plague reappears outside of Scotland. Because we know that there are survivors in there, Bob Hoskins sends Rhona Mitra in it find the cure (isn’t that what you’d do?) and return with it. In the process she finds Malcolm McDowell playing (what else?) an evil genius who’s holed up in a Scottish castle taking a Colonel Kurtz-like turn.

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We’re in Santiago, Chile for a few days, on our way home from a trip to see Easter Island - not a particularly apocalyptic thing although it might be a good place to ride out a zombie attack if you need to. I can’t remember if it was mentioned in “World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War” or not. The island is one of the most remote, and the ocean floor drops off sharply near it, possibly making it difficult for underwater zombies to reach land.

But I digress.

We took a break from sight-seeing and all the empanadas and ham-and-cheese sandwiches to see “Soy Leyenda” yesterday, which I’d been interested in seeing in the US but didn’t have time to catch before we left. The film was in English with Spanish subtitles… there are several places in the film where you can barely hear lines, and it’s odd to see them clearly (in Spanish) in the subtitles. Given how weak my Spanish is, I could barely understand the subtitles, too.

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I’ve written about Neil Marshall’s new film, “Doomsday”, a few times before. Marshall brings with him a good resume of genre films: “Dog Soldiers” and “The Descent”, which leaves many people anticipating his new bigger budget, bigger concept film “Doomsday”.

In the world of “Doomsday”, Scotland is walled off to protect the rest of the world from a deadly virus called “Reaper”. 30 years pass and there’s a Reaper outbreak in another country, leading our heroes to enter the ruins of Scotland in order to try to find a cure. Malcolm McDowell stars as “Kane”, patterned after Kurtz from “Heart of Darkness” (or “Apocalypse Now” in the event that you’ve never read the book).

Someday we’ll progress to a point where scary, over the edge guys in media won’t be named variations of Cain or Kurtz.

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Bird flu hasn’t been in the news much recently, but that doesn’t mean that fears about it have gone away.

The most recent news is that it appears that there may be a case of human-to-human transmission, where the father of a man in China who died from bird flu has also contracted it. The man appears to have developed bird flu without any contact with infected birds.

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Naegleria fowleri - sounds a little like some kind of scam where someone emails you telling you they want to wire you lots of money if you will send them your bank account number. It’s actually a brain-eating amoeba, and when you see a big graphic proclaiming “Brain! Eating! Amoeba!” on a new service web page, it tends to catch your attention.

While not strictly apocalyptic (except to the person whose brain is being eaten), it qualifies as “Plague” and is therefore blog-worthy. As an added benefit, it even has a global warming tie-in!

The news article describes amoeba infections as attacks, as if the amoeba are sitting around dark corners of lakes waiting to mug you. In reality they live on the bottoms of lakes and go up your noise when water is stirred up such that it goes… up your nose. So don’t get water up your nose and you’ll probably be okay.
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Phil Plait posts the likely answer to the question of what’s going on with the Peruvian meteorite - it really was a meteorite, and the reason people got sick was that the area it struck was tainted with arsenic.

No sign of the Anti-Christ at this time.

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Hey did you hear the one about the meteorite and Peru?

Something hit the countryside in Peru leaving a giant muddy crater and a bunch of sick people. Almost everyone’s calling it a meteorite, and at least one person is connecting it to a prophecy of the third Anti-Christ by Nostradamus. I can’t keep track of how many Anti-Christs there are, or are supposed to be… maybe kids will dress up as the Anti-Christ for Halloween this year. But in a sprawling screed that connects… lots of dots… with some very shaky lines, The Temple of Love mentions Hitler, George Bush, Peru, Nostradamus, Tom Cruise and the Peruvian meteorite all in one very long breath. Time to inhale, please. Or maybe it’s too late for that.

Boing Boing likens it to the Andromeda Strain.

Phil Plait of the Bad Astronomy blog, says it doesn’t really sound like a meteorite… usually they’re small enough to burn up completely or large enough to behave differently from what’s been observed in Peru.

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Back in the 90’s, Ebola was all the rage. With books like “The Hot Zone” and movies like “Outbreak”, Ebola was the fashionable new apocalyptic plague. You can even buy a plush, stuffed Ebola microbe toy. And Ebola is the base of the infection “Rage” in the zombie films “28 Days Later” and “28 Weeks Later”.

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