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dobbspic I write articles on science, medicine, nature, culture and other matters for the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Slate, National Geographic, Scientific American Mind, and other publications, and am working on my fourth book, The Orchid and the Dandelion, which expands on my recent December 2009 Atlantic article. In August 2010, I'll be moving to London for a year to work on the book. I'll also serve as a senior fellow at City University London's MA science journalism program.

You're encouraged to check out my third book Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral, which traces the strangest but most forgotten controversy in Darwin's career; subscribe to Neuron Culture by email; see more of my work at my main website; or track Twitter feed, my Google Reader shared items, or my Tumblr log, which gets it all.

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    « Torture as learned helplessness, or how to make prisoners really sick on purpose | Main | This morning's roundup: Swine flu goes global »

    As Wednesday closes, A Pandemic Chronicle sums it up

    Posted on: April 29, 2009 9:03 PM, by David Dobbs

    9B59C675-981B-454C-B0C3-39B982AC35D6.jpg

    It'd be nice to think otherwise. But even as WHO moves to Phase 5, recognizing that there is sustained human-to-human spread of this virus, we're still not sure how much punch it has. Which, as SophieZoe points out at A Pandemic Chronicle doesn't leave us with much :

    Beyond the change in the official alert level we know no more today than we knew yesterday, which was pretty much nothing at all.

    We do not yet know how the virus is going to behave in the general population and how severe or mild the disease will be on average. We do not even know if the virus will show %u201Csticking power%u201D and not just burn itself out in a week or two, whether naturally, or helped along by aggressive mitigation efforts.

    We don't know any number of things that we need to know, but there are great minds working feverishly to find us the answers. Until we have them we are utterly clueless about what we will and what we will not face. So, along with the rest of the world I await answers.

    I would amend only by saying we know enough that we should be worried. .

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