The Norwalk virus.

Date;  6 and 8 December 2002.

The Norwalk virus, it was big fun but it suddenly stopped.... Why?

Timeline date=06 and 08 December 2002.

Ha! This is fun! It is now 5 Feb 2003 and when I looked at some news I just read another 400 people have contracted the Norwalk virus on a cruise ship under the name of Sun Princess... That is a laughable finding, I was afraid it had stopped but now I see it proceeds again. Nice nice nice.

But let me not show to much emotions and give some clear cut findings, to my attention came that on a ship called 'The Amsterdam' a break out of the virus was observed. I started tracing that kind of (nice and laughable) news and constantly the next name came popping up in the news: Carnival, is the name of the owner of some of those cruise ships.

Also it was observed that according to American health officials it was to early to say that there was some 'significant rise'. It was only later when I found out how they trace these kind of outbreaks, and my dear colleagues in statistics I would like to ask you to review your statistical procedures. They look not very smart if you ask me, why wait until you have 100 million of 'passenger seamiles' and then look if there is 'significant more' illness observed? Don't you have better ways?  

The Carnival name came popping up again and I just wondered if there would be four 'devils' out there doing a good job on making people ill. It is wise to know that also in the war in Afghanistan this virus was observed (but I never heard of that particular virus before, so it could all be 'coincidental'). To me the combination of Afghanistan and the name Carnival was a bit much and I was asking myself the question 'Could this be some echo from story 41' (It is the Carnival in the city story, sharply 12 hours after publication of that story there was the collision of two planes over Germany, I am still waiting of the reports of the investigation of that one but it could be the American plane pilot did this on purpose....).

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If you read the Carnival story you see the end is rather rough and therefore I felt the need to express some worries of me to the ship owners. Therefore I did send two emails, the first one was a 'fast fast fast' made email to a Dutch cruise ship owner and I was in a hurry because that day we had Santa Clause day in Holland. A few days later I also did send some email to the Carnival company, it is nice to know that this email contained a truly horrible scenario about how things could turn out.

It was a bit like;

Also I did mention the fact that such a cruise ship could be stopped rather difficult and if you just blow it away what would happen to that nasty smallpox virus? So the Americans would be forced to nuke it to an end and may be even have to use four nukes simultaneously exploding from four sides of the ship.....
And last but not least I had to mention that during the war in Afghanistan there also was anthrax at the scene in America so it could be that the war in the Iraqi landscape generated similar stuff.

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So am I some asshole or not? But in practice I hope we will have never ever smallpox into humanity again. As said before only the most poor nations would carry the most devastating load of such an attack, even in this little country we have stockpiled enough for all citizens (and some million doses extra). 

After some time I did observe some strange echo in the Media, the White House came with some declaration that there would be a 'full scale retaliation' against a bio or chemical attack. This included even the use of nukes...
Later it was read that this declaration was made on 13 September for 'internal use' and that a slightly different version surfaced only later somewhere half December 2002.
Right now (5 Feb 2003) when we are on the possible edge of war in Iraq the declaration was made public again in Jan 2003, wow wow wow... The use of nukes... 

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Final remarks; I am pleased that the Norwalk virus is back on stage. So my dear health authorities, if it is true that these outbreaks are 'man made' and if it is even true that there are four 'devils' who dance this dance why don't you give it a try and find out if you can find them?
Do your best, it can be passengers or crew members. I do not know and if I knew I would not tell you...

Now we end the proceedings of the Norwalk virus. The next part is devoted to some shoe bomb alert around Christmas 2002. 

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