Cat scratch fever, dunh dunh, dunnnh...

The Drudge Report is, plainly and simply, the Internet's panic button.

I found this story there today. It links, as a great many of Drudge's headlines do, to his pillow buddy Breit Bart's site.

US scientists discover new, potentially deadly bacteria

It's related to trench fever and cat scratch disease. THe article stresses that it is especially dangerous to people with weak or suppressed immune systems. Like there's something that isn't.

I highly suspect that mutations of bacteria are found quite often. This is a case of one woman who fell ill to such a new bacteria after visiting Peru. She LIVED, for gods' sake. She's FINE. Her traveling companion didn't even get sick.

And then Drudge posts this story at the same time, with this headline, which is NOT the headline of the actual story:

Cats Invading Shelters 'Due to Global Warming'...

And since I read the other story before I saw this headline, the first picture that came to my mind was a stadium full of hurricane victims screaming in terror as cats poured through the doors with death-encrusted claws.

It only lasted for a moment before my higher brain moved it to the silly bin. But look at the trigger words. "Global warming". "Invading". "Shelters". EVERYBODY PANIC!

The story is actually talking about animal shelters being overrun because, it seems, warmer temperatures make cats hornier and they're breeding more kittens.

Oh, the horror.

The article's headline is "Adoption Group: Cat Invasion Due to Global Warming"; it includes the word "adoption", a happier meme that brings to mind actors and pop stars invading traveling to foreign countries to bring back adorable brown children. And the picture -- aww, baby kittycats!

Warm fluffiness, however, is not Drudge's métier.

The headlines, the screen crawls, the news-at-eleven blurbs plant these triggers in our minds and repeat them again and again, and we make connections. It only takes a split second for a meme to stamp your mind, and even if your first impression is disproven or discarded, that stamp remains there to be reinforced over and over.

Ground Zero articles of interest:

Bring the troops home...quarantined, please

More drug-resistant body-invading organisms rearing up:

Acinetobacter Baumannii: Coming Soon to a Hospital Near You

Now dubbed "Supergerms", they spread without warning and seemingly
without official notices since they are infections instead of diseases. The
government is taking advantage of this technicality.

Apparently, "diseases" require official CDC notices, but "infections" do not. What is supposed to be the difference between "infection" and "disease" is beyond my current knowledge, especially since the CDC has whole departments for "infectious diseases".

But the crux of it is that this particular bacterium is showing up in military and veterans' hospitals, carried by patients recently returned from Iraq, and it isn't getting reported to the public.

So first I go to the VA hospital and get an infection, then I come back when I'm dying and they experiment on me. So not liking this.

CDC information on Acinetobacter

It seems Acinetobacter has been around for a while. Are we to assume it's always been resistant to common antibiotics, or did it get that way in recent times?

Another plane quarantine

Just in case you've already forgotten the fairly recent incident of the plane held in Newark, NJ for hours while the airlines sorted out sick people, here's another small reminder of how vulnerable we are to bioweaponry.

Psst. "Difficult to treat" = "drug-resistant".

U.S. authorities quarantine air traveler with TB

"This is an unusual TB organism, one that's very, very difficult to treat. And we want to make sure that we have done everything we possibly can to identify people who could be at risk,"

Tuberculosis is serious. A positive test for exposure bans you from health care and child care jobs for life. There are several antibiotic-resistant strains, because we've been treating it for so long. Oh, and it kills you slowly and unpleasantly.

Am I saying that these are cases of bioweaponry? Not necessarily; in fact, I don't think it's likely. Bioweaponry, when it is finally used en masse, will be harder to detect and spread more quickly than TB does. No, what these are is....practice. Drills.

Remember that a plague is a national emergency, and that President Bush now becomes dictator at his own discretion in a national emergency. They^TM have to see how fast authorities respond to such incidents so they can design an outbreak that gets past the authorities (the ones who aren't in on it) long enough to take hold. Next will probably come quarantine drills on public buildings.

Ground Zero articles of interest: