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Fox Nation Goes Nirther

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Occasional Reader5/28/2009 7:41:28 pm PDT

re: #396 Altermite

A pandemic is a disease that spreads across a wide area in an unusual pattern. With a flu, any variety that appears out of season effectively becomes pandemic, thanks to rapid transportation and incubation times. The word pandemic for flu doesn’t mean much more than non-seasonal. Declaring it pandemic was entirely accurate. The hysteria came because people didn’t actually know what pandemic means.

Oh, but that can’t be right… commentator Fred Fisk on NPR this morning said that a “pandemic” is, by definition, global, and therefore “global pandemic” is redundant. And it’s NPR, so it must be true.

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