1) I don’t know if you’ve seen it yet, but there is a map of “Waterfowl Flyways of North America” (put mouse cursor on icon in lower right corner and click to enlarge). This shows the routes that migratory ducks and geese follow when they return to the southern USA in the fall after mingling with Eurasian migratory birds in the subarctic over the summer.
2) That is, the map shows the primary routes along which Avian flu would be transmitted into the USA:
a) Coastal bays like the Chesapeake and Delaware on the East Coast and San Francisco on the West Coast ,
b) Major rivers like the Hudson (New York), Susquehanna (Pennsylvania), Potomac (Maryland/Virginia), Mississippi plus tributaries (Midwest),
Ohio (Midwest), and Columbia (Oregon) , and
c) Either side of major barriers like the Rocky Mountains, the deserts of Nevada/Arizona, and the Sierra Mountains
3) Note that it’s possible that an Avian flu pandemic might persist for several years, since flocks of migratory waterfowl form a “reservoir” in which it can culture –in the same way that the plague is preserved in prairie dog colonies of the Southwest USA and infects people every year. See: “Plagues and Peoples” by William McNeill.
4) As an exercise in “survivalist paranoia”, it’s interesting that Porter Goss abruptly resigned as Director of CIA back in early May — a few days after the White House released it’s Pandemic Flu plan. Most people don’t know that Porter Goss is quite wealthy –well over a million net worth. In the 1960s after the Cuban Missile Crisis, Porter Goss left the CIA and settled on Sanibel Island near the bottom of southwest Florida — one of only a few spots in the USA that would have survived the massive fallout from a Soviet Nuclear Strike.
5) Now, the news reports that “Goss and his wife own a central Virginia farm, where they raise cattle, sheep and chickens. ” See very bottom of this article
It just so happens that Porter Goss’s Central Virginia farm is one of the few spots in the country that does not have geese carrying Avian flu flying over it.
6) When the pandemic hits, interstate transport shuts down and the politicians in Washington are feeding on each other like cannibals –literally, not just politically — Goss will be setting on his front porch eating homemade cheese, sipping homemade Cabernet and enjoying the rural sunset. Laughing his behind off as he tells his wife about how Donald Rumsfeld talked
Vice President Dick Cheney into buying a $2.9 Million estate on the Chesapeake Bay–an area which receives the largest dump of migratory goose droppings in the country. Regards, – D.W.
Letter Re: Asian Avian Flu and Waterfowl Migratory Flyways
