Anyone for cholera?

The slow collapse of the American Empire is gruesome yet compelling. I’ve been watching Goldman Sachs drain the lifeblood from a fatally injured economy while people concern themselves with the death of a pop star. When will the madness end? We are such a bizarre species; playing the fiddle and concerning ourselves with the minutae of a celebrity while oceanic fish stocks collapse and the advances made by the ‘green revolution’ are made obsolete by a lack of fresh water. All ecosystem models point to a ‘critical value’… a tipping point beyond which the system is unable to continue to sustain population growth. I’ve been watching the emergence of recent pandemics with interest, but at this stage nothing has really stepped up to the plate. Avian Influenza was a contender, but high mortality was coupled with poor transmission, so unless bird flu can get it together and perhaps mutate to become more virulent while retaining the elevated mortality rates associated with cytokine storms, I’m not liking it as a real form of population control. Other contenders are a bit more Old-Skool. Malaria is a good one, invertebrate resistance to pesticides is another. But my gut feeling at the moment is that in the not-too-distant future, sweet fresh water will be the limiting factor. Perhaps this will be the thing that keeps our population in check.