It is sweeping the globe; it is recruiting adherents; it promises the world and laughs maniacally as it takes it all away. Everyone wants it because once you have it, you never have to worry about it coming for you.

They warned us for years of the possibility of such a contagion, and we laughed because pandemics only ever hit the third world or medieval populations, but now, just as we all think we’re getting things straightened out on our own, here comes Mama la Natura taking care of business in our stead.

If you stand in my shoes, you look upon it all as a comedy -- a human comedy, a divine comedy, a comedy of errors, and a comedy of apathy. If you slip your tootsies into my stilettos, you watch everyone coming in from the poultry-laden East with a measure of suspicion and awe as if perhaps you might be the one staring down the migratory pigeon or flash frozen hot wing that harbors H5N1.

Yes, ye olde avian influenza, or as esteemed North Korean leader Kim Jong Il would say, "bird fru."

What I would love to know is why something that has killed fewer people than your average January murder spree in Youngstown, Ohio has mobilized the international community’s health and science resources against it with such focus that even our erstwhile federal government has allocated riches beyond compare to defeating it. Europe has suffered the loss of swans and ducks, a few cats, and some budgerigars (I have to assume); and Central Asia has raised the alarm of suspected human cases. But while immaculate laboratories in Switzerland churn out formulas for miracle drugs to combat the menace that has forced the culling of our precious fowl resources (an economic and gastronomic horror to be sure, but not a diplomatic disaster), we, the rest of the global population at large, remain fearful, suspicious, and otherwise exactly the same as we were before this health hazard developed.

Print and electronic media have several stories every day about the bane to human existence that is bird fru. I even know someone who wants it to turn into a pandemic because she believes it will force the second coming of the Renaissance (long complex argument through which I have never sat in its entirety because I generally begin stabbing the nearest writing utensil into my aural cavity). Now, the second coming of Christ I can see, but a rerun of a slew of Italian businessmen promoting themselves via writers and sculptors in fancy knickers… I think I’ll skip that, thank you -- the original was good; a modern reprise could go horrifyingly wrong.

How in the name of all things holy can I take this disease seriously when the absolute first thing that crosses my Czech Pilsner-steeped cranial zone is a not-all-together clever satire of a classic: "Love in a Time of Cholera." Fortunately for all of you, I could not come up with a copy of Marquez’ masterpiece in order to do any "research" (read "plagiarism"). So, you only have to suffer my discussion of the amusement I garner from misery rather than an actually fictional narrative.

My delusions of a raucous little literary romp would be "Love in a Time of Bird Fru." I see a pallid, well-turned out yet scrawny New Yorker, but rather than the melancholy strains of a violinist dying of a broken heart, we hear Carlos Santana in the background berating the cold-hearted duena for her fecklessness and pretensions. As the city around them dies of avian influenza, they achieve only a coitus intellectuallis (I never studied Latin, by the by, so I had to go with what sounded correct) before dying of consumption just to be different.

Though "Cholera" may have used an indubitably more solid plot structure and slightly more erudite terms, only in the early twenty-first century could have aging red-necks and youthful Southeast Asians all fearing that their KFC or foie gras could kill them in some way other than heart disease. So, while bird fru continues its circumnavigation of ye olde planet Earth, we must ask ourselves, shall we be cowed by the fears of a plate of Chicken Kiev?