Thomas P.M. Barnett

■"Thais Suspect Human Spread of Bird Flu: Fear Woman Got Virus From Family," by Keith Bradsher, New York Times, 28 September 2004, p. A3.

Now it looks like the emerging threat of the avian flu took a turn for the worse: it would appear that human-to-human transfer is possible.

Human-to-human transmission of a new strain of influenza has long ranked at or near the top of nightmares for public health experts, who warn that it could in theory cause a pandemic killing millions of people worldwide, and possibly hundreds of millions.

You want to talk about a System Perturbation that would rock the Core and possibly lead to some profound firewalling between itself and the Gapóthis would be it.