Scare Stories: Chirac’s Clinically Depressed Poodle
SCARE Stories: Anorak’s daily look at horror stories making news – Chicrac’s depressed poodle, killer fleas and palm oil frenzy.
Bugs of war! From killer hornets to murderous fleas, a new book reveals how insects can be weapons of mass destruction
Now imagine the scene. It is shortly before 9am on a crowded platform on the London Underground and an ordinary looking woman is reaching inside her plastic shopping bag for a can of fizzy drink.
Without attracting the slightest attention from her fellow passengers, the woman quietly strips off the length of masking tape that covers the can’s opening and puts the can underneath the seat she’s been sitting on – before jumping onto the train that is just about to leave.
Then, as the doors close, she watches as the 500 hungry and infected fleas she’s been keeping inside the can begin to swarm onto the platform…
The woman can only guess how many of the hundreds of people on the Tube that morning will have red lumps on them later in the day – but she knows only too well that most of them will be wracked by fever soon afterwards.
Only a few hundred people may die from the effects of the bubonic plague carried by the fleas inside that perfectly ordinary can, but there’s no doubt that millions more will panic – exactly as this terrorist had planned. A case of bio-terrorism by insect.
This is fiction – for the moment at least – but the terrifying truth is that it could happen all too easily, as Natural Sciences Professor Jeffrey Lockwood predicts in a new book, Six-Legged Soldiers, which analyses the use of insects as weapons of war.
As seen in the…Daily Mail
“Rampaging Wild Elephants Kill 3 in Northeast India” – New York Times
“Sprawl Flattens Frogs, Other Amphibians Struggling to Survive” – Seattle Times
“Palm Oil Frenzy Threatens to Wipe Out Orangutans” – Associated Press
“Former French President Chirac Hospitalised After Mauling by His Clinically Depressed Poodle” – Daily Mail
Posted: 22nd, January 2009 | In: Reviews Comment (1) | TrackBack | Permalink
