Spain's Queen Sofia has been in Guatemala this week, surrounded by officials intent on reinforcing the message that the country's severed highways and bridges represent a singular calamity and not just a regular feature of the rainy season in Central America.
Spain has now surpassed Sweden as the largest provider of emergency financial aid to the region ( €55m) and Mel Gibson has pledged $1m of his own cash. The US government has increased its initially paltry offering to $350,000 (through USAID).
Meanwhile, as Hurricane Wilma begins to swing by the Yucatan, the check-in desks at Cancun's airport are faced with long lines of the kind of daredevil holiday-makers that book their Caribbean vacations in early Autumn.
The flu pandemic of the 1968/9 season killed 750,000, making it the least deadly of the twentieth century's outbreaks. At the other end of the scale the 'Spanish Flu' of 1918 (appropriately a strain of swine flu) attacked lung cells not usually vulnerable to this type of virus.
Miseryguts has been stockpiling cans of food for around 3 years in preparation for the great bird flu plague which the media feels is now upon us. The H5N1 variant of avian influenza has been around since 1997 and has yet to be sustainably transmitted between humans. Those that catch it from a sneezing swan appear to have a 50% chance of survival. Nevertheless the kind of antigenic shift needed to make this a genuine threat to mammalian health could result in a low pathogenic form with reduced instances of mortality.
