I'm not quite sure how a flu pandemic would affect the stock market (and thus dovetail into my theory that the market will crash) but I guess it's possible that people just wouldn't be in a spending mood. As it stands today we are all sitting around waiting for a little, highly infectious virus to mutate, which when it does will kill millions and millions of people because we're defenseless against it. Fresh word from the Vietnamese agriculture ministry that the virus's antigen structure has changed (an antigenic shift has occured). This could be what we're all waiting for: a strain of this flu that can pass from human to human. Scientists claim that the H5N1 strain will most likely infect pig populations and from there (inside a pig) possibly combine with another strain of flu found in humans and then that will be passed from a pig to a human(s) and they'll sneeze on two friends and so on and so on... A report from China shows that pigs have already contracted H5N1 influenza, so depending on how long it remains in this (or other) pig population(s) we may see a human infection version.
Some things are certain, I will stay away from Chinatown, Vietnamese restaurants, airplanes, airports, subways and my child will not be playing at the public playground. Our apartment will transform overnight from Oscar Madison's oily t-shirt to the new autoclave in that episode of M*A*S*H. I will start making my own lattes and probably eat beef instead of poultry (irrational as that may be). I'll bet I won't be alone on this one; Netflix, Amazon and Ebay will do a brisk business. Worker attendance will hit an all time low. Baseball games will be deserted. It will be a really good time to write that novel, paint that picture and record that solo album. Real estate will get really cheap (I don't know why this would happen but I'll just mention it because it's a fantasy of mine). Introversion will finally be "in" but sadly there won't be anyone around to impress.
