I’ve been compiling a list of topics to write about on this blog for the last nine months, a to do list that’s grown so long that it now exceeds my capacity to complete them in an efficient manner. One idea about the future of medicine that I’ve been meaning to get to is the topic at hand, future pandemics, but I wasn’t sure how to approach the issue. Should I begin with a cursory review of one of the worst pandemics in history, the 1918 H1N1 flu that killed 50 million people worldwide, and segue into conjecture about what factors could make such an event easily happen again? Or should I tackle the “known unknowns” about what sort of organism might cause the event, what part of the globe it would likely come from, and what sort of damage it would do to people’s health and well-being? Alternatively, I could paint the worst-case scenario: the death of a sizable portion of humanity and the ensuing collapse of social, moral, and economic order.

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