People are always surprised when things go really wrong. When Katrina struck New Orleans and flooded the city, shocked surprise was written on everybody’s face. I heard “I can’t believe this is happening” from countless people on television.

People were surprised even though they’d been warned. Predictions about what would happen to the levees in a catastrophic hurricane had been made for years. A century ago, the nearby town of Galveston, Texas, had been wiped off the map by a monstrous hurricane. There were more timely warnings too, like the evacuation order ignored by so many because they couldn’t leave or decided not to. I remember hearing one guy responding to a reporter who asked if he would leave saying “Hell no! Me and my buddies are going to hole up, drink some beers and ride ‘er out.”

When the city flooded, I wondered whether he and his friends had survived or if they were wading through the city with disbelief on their faces. I wonder if we’ll have the same stunned look when the next influenza pandemic hits.

I first started reading up on avian influenza – bird flu – a few days ago, when a report on H5N1, a particularly virulent strain of it, caught my eye. H5N1 has already infected humans as well as birds. There have been 122 confirmed cases in people outside of China, including 62 people who have died.

The report I read dealt with cases inside China. China has confirmed only three cases of H5N1 in people. But according to a researcher who has been investigating bird flu in China on behalf of the World Health Organization (WHO), these cases represent only the “tip of the iceberg”. Masato Tashiro, head of virology at Tokyo’s National Institute of Infectious Disease, has listed “several dozen” outbreaks including almost 300 deaths and 3000 people quarantined.

He has also documented seven human-to-human transmissions. This is frightening. Bird flu is only bird flu until it starts passing between humans. Then it’s just the flu, in this case, a lethal version of it. So far, there are no confirmed cases of human-to-human transmission of bird flu, although there are a couple of suspected cases. If Tashiro’s report is correct, we are much closer to a pandemic.

In 1918 and 1919, a worldwide epidemic of influenza killed between 25 and 50 million people. It was caused by H1N1: bird flu. The effects of this new strain were severe:

The strain was unusual in commonly killing many young and healthy victims, as opposed to more common influenzas which caused the bulk of their mortality among newborns and the old and infirm. People without symptoms could be struck suddenly and be rendered too feeble to walk within hours; many would die the next day. Symptoms included a blue tint to the face and coughing up blood caused by severe obstruction of the lungs. In further stages, the virus caused an uncontrollable haemorrhaging that filled the lungs, and patients would drown in their own body fluids.

The last two influenza pandemics, in 1957 and 1968, both originated in Asia, just like H5N1. One of the reasons for this is the living conditions in these areas. In parts of China, some people raise pigs in their homes. Pigs are like a “mixing vessel” because they can get bird flu and human flu at the same time. When this happens, the viruses can swap genetic material – and thus genetic traits – with each other like trading cards. If a bird flu virus gets dealt the “human-to-human-transmission” card from a human flu virus, we have a nightmarish problem.

Many people and pigs in Asia also come in close and daily contact with poultry, creating what one researcher calls a “genetic-reassortment laboratory — the mix of an unprecedented number of people, pigs, and poultry.” He goes on:

It is sobering to realize that in 1968, when the most recent influenza pandemic occurred, the virus emerged in a China that had a human population of 790 million, a pig population of 5.2 million, and a poultry population of 12.3 million; today, these populations number 1.3 billion, 508 million, and 13 billion, respectively. Similar changes have occurred in the human and animal populations of other Asian countries, creating an incredible mixing vessel for viruses. Given this reality, as well as the exponential growth in foreign travel during the past 50 years, we must accept that a pandemic is coming — although whether it will be caused by H5N1 or by another novel strain remains to be seen.

Add to this mixing pot the Chinese government’s legendary reputation for secrecy and deceit (they hid SARS too) and we have a volatile combination, one that the WHO says the world is “ill-prepared” to deal with. The WHO has “urged all countries to develop preparedness plans, but only 40 have done so”. Is Canada one of those countries?

The answer is a qualified yes. There is a plan, but its adequacy is questionable. And if you’re not a medical professional or an essential service provider, you might find it particularly un-reassuring. (Speaking of which: one part of the plan is headlined Guidelines for the Management of Mass Fatalities During an Influenza Pandemic.)

Other than quarantines, which are especially difficult to enforce in free societies, the main weapons against an influenza outbreak are vaccines and antiviral drugs. The problem with the vaccine approach is that you can’t make vaccines for a pandemic virus until it starts to spread and researchers get their hands on it. In other words, people need to start getting sick before a vaccine can be made.

Canada has a $325 million, ten-year contact with ID Biomedical in Vancouver to produce vaccines for an influenza pandemic. The problem is that it would take the company seven months to produce its first batch of the vaccine, which doesn’t include clinical trials, and even then it could only produce about eight million doses a month. As of the beginning of 2005, ID did not even have a manufacturing plant with a level of biological containment high enough to allow it to manufacture the vaccine.

Antiviral drugs are also available, but they are in worldwide demand as governments seek to stockpile them. According to Canada’s plan, “current supplies of antivirals, both within and outside of Canada, are very limited”. This means that the supplies of vaccines and antivirals need to be rationed, and they are, in order of importance: health care workers, then essential service providers, then high-risk individuals, and finally healthy adults and children.

That order might be logical, but it’s certainly not reassuring. Remember that the outbreak in 1918-19 was unusual because it killed “many young and healthy victims”. Given the limited amount of drugs, the young and the healthy who find themselves at the end of the treatment list might not get treated at all.

So what can you do? Standard survival preparedness, like a stash of food, water and fuel, is always a good idea, although I’m the first to admit I don’t have one. There’s also a booming online trade in antiviral medicines, if you wanted to stock up on those: search for Tamiflu on the Internet and you’ll find plenty of places to buy it, although it’s really expensive and who knows if you’ll ever get it.

Government officials tell people not to stockpile these drugs even as they work to do just that. There’s no guarantee they’ll work against whatever virus triggers the next pandemic anyway, so it might just be best to save your money and buy a supply of surgeon-style face masks. And hope that you can avoid going out in public for as long as possible.

It all sounds crazy, I know. Just like the environmentalist loonies who warned that Katrina would come, sooner or later. You might be shocked when an influenza pandemic strikes and you find yourself at the bottom of a list of priorities. But if you’ve read this far, you can’t be surprised.

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More reading:
H5N1 on Wikipedia
Official Chinese bird flu deaths could be ‘tip of iceberg’
Most Canadians don’t feel avian flu is a threat: poll
Bird Flu, Liberty, and Quarantine
Canadian Pandemic Influenza Plan
World Health Organization: Avian influenza FAQ
Preparing for the Next Pandemic
Countries ill-prepared for influenza pandemic

Everybody knows that decisions taken at one point in life can have an impact that stretches far into the future. What you rarely know is when you’ve made one of those decisions. It’s often not until much later that you recognize them.

After I passed Grade 3, which would make me around eight or nine years old, my family moved to Dundas. I had grown up in Scarborough, not far from the Scarborough Bluffs. I think my parents were looking for a better place for my siblings and me to grow up. To them, that included sending me to a tiny private Christian school in Copetown.

This began an often strange, certainly life-altering seven years of fundamentalist Protestant education. But none of that, including what I took in school, was my decision. That is, until the summer before Grade 9, the second-last year I would be there, and the first year we got to “choose” our elective courses.

The reason I put choose in quotes is because it wasn’t much of a choice. As the tradition went, boys were interested in woodworking and mechanics, and girls were interested in cooking and an activity I think might have been called “domestic planning”. Naturally, all the girls took the “girl” classes, and all the boys took the “boy” classes.

If that’s sounds like a ridiculous idea to you – keep in mind I’m talking about ten years ago, not 1950 – then you’re in about the same spot I was in back then. The difference is that you’re probably thinking sexism. I was thinking sex.

Well not exactly, since at that point, I was still fantasizing about first base. I had never had a girlfriend, and neither had most of the guys in my class (when I said the school was small, I meant it – they had only one or two classes per grade back then). So my friend Mark and I hatched a plan. We decided we’d go to cooking class to get to the girls.

The plan worked beautifully and we were soon sporting girlfriends, after overcoming various objections to us attending the class. The only thing I remember making in that class is bannock, but looking back, my decision to take it was a beginning.

Through grades nine and ten, which I attended at the private school, and grades eleven and twelve when I went to a public school in Dundas, my parents and high school counselors had a single message for me about my future after graduation: “go to college and take something technical”.

It was understood that science, business and technology courses at university or college were for smart people who wanted to make money. Trades were for people who weren’t as smart and who were okay with just scraping by (today, the wealthiest, most in-demand people I know are employed in trades). The only thing worse than going into trades was pursuing a “useless degree” in a social science or in something like journalism, which I had said I wanted to take.

Because this was accepted wisdom, as a teenager it seems only natural that I ignored it. I renounced my “choice” to take software engineering at Mohawk College, a decision I’d made under considerable pressure, soon after I graduated.

“Fine”, my parents told me. “Go out and get a job then.”

So I did, washing dishes in a Hamilton restaurant. I’d put the cooking class on my resume. After three weeks, I was cooking behind the line with a guy named Avian, the most irrepressible and irresistible ladies man I’ve ever met (his propensity for adultery ended in tragedy). For the next two years I cooked for a living and drank as a hobby.

After two years I’d had enough. I ended up taking software engineering in Mohawk College, the same course I’d rebelled against when I graduated high school. I didn’t know what to do at that point, but I’d had enough of peeling potatoes and the lingering smell of garlic and fryer oil I couldn’t get rid of.

What I learned at Mohawk has done me well over the years, so my parents’ advice wasn’t so bad after all. But when I look at where I am now though and how I got here, what stands out to me isn’t the technical skills I learned in college, it’s the skills of communication and cooking. My least precious skills are now my most valuable.

In hindsight, it all seems so obvious. The biggest perception people have of people in my field, whether programmers, technicians, or the guy who runs the computer help-desk, is that we aren’t friendly and we don’t communicate. In other words, we have no social skills. The few who do have them have a huge advantage over the many that don’t.

The same goes for cooking. Far from simply a way of making things taste good, the skill of cooking is really about nutrition. Food is, after all, more about supporting life than it is about enjoying it, something we in the West have forgotten. From nutrition to health, one of the world’s most lucrative and fastest-growing industries, is a natural progression, and so companies like Empowered Nutrition are born. Along with a lot of very tasty meals.

So let the specialists keep on specializing, but let the generalists generalize. Learn something social and do something technical, or vice versa. Encourage the impractical and maybe something practical, or valuable, or happy will appear.

You never know what might happen. I’m told the cooking class at that little private school has been co-ed ever since.

“Sprawl living stretches out like a life sentence in isolation.”

That’s how this article starts, describing life in the suburbs of Hamilton. If this article doesn’t describe you – or your house – it describes someone you know and where they live. We’ve all been in at least one.

By popular demand, click here to see selected photos from our trip to France and The Netherlands. Use the Previous and Next links at the top to navigate.

Some things might still be kind of screwed up with the software I’m using, let me know if you have any issues. Specifically, the Next link might disappear before you’ve seen all the photos. There are about 47 in all, so if this happens, just click Previous or refresh the page and then go back to the problem photo, the Next link should reappear.

I’ve been using Gmail for a while now and I’m convinced it is by far the best online email service out there. Besides having superior usability, search features and storage space, there’s something else about it that really stuck out from the very first day: it behaves differently than most other websites. The way it works reminded me more of a desktop application – or a Flash website – than the websites I was used to.

It’s a lot more interactive than most websites, and its a lot faster too. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you can experience the same sort of thing on Google Maps. There’s a lot more stuff to click on, things move around, you’ve got controls that are non-standard for websites (like the zoom slider, for example). As a web developer, I often wondered just how Gmail did it.

Today I found out. It’s technology called Ajax, which is short for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. This relatively new idea, based on a combination of older technologies which have been in use for a long time, is enabling the creation of websites with a lot more interactivity and much better interfaces. I’m not going to get into the specifics of how it works, since you can read all about it yourself, but make no mistake: this is the web development technology of the future.

But where does this leave Flash? Flash is designed to accomplish pretty much the same thing as Ajax, namely websites that are more interactive, react quicker and have more interesting interfaces. Ajax does appear to have some initial advantages: it loads faster than Flash, it still displays information in standard HTML which allows search engines to easily index the content, and it doesn’t require downloading the Flash plugin (the only “extra” technology required is for Javascript to be enabled). Flash still appears to be better for really graphical, flashy websites, as the name indicates. But for someone like myself who values content over looks, and for the many businesses that do too, I wonder which technology will be the most appealing.

My apologies to my non-technical readers, which is probably most of you, for bombarding you with this sudden onslaught of geek-talk. You might have no idea what I’m talking about, but stay tuned: I have an idea for a web application that will demonstrate this technology and will probably be helpful to you too.