In her book on the 1918 influenza(3) Gina Kolata also calls attention to the often repeated phenomenon of how epidemics can move quickly through a country, "hopscotching over some towns while felling others." (p. 63) She reports that "After an influenza pandemic of 1789, a young American doctor named Robert Johnson puzzled over how the infection could spread so far and wide, and so quickly" (p. 63) Johnson discussed the rapid outbreaks in Great Britain and on ships at sea. Kolata reports that the 1918 "flu's mortality rates peaked in Boston and Bombay in the same week. But New York, just a few hours from Boston, had its peak three weeks later" (p. 62) She reports that Johnson finally decided that "influenza must arise from some sort of changes in the atmosphere (aerobiology) but that, once it got started, it could spread from person to person."(pp. 63-64) This NASA news item, All the World's a Stage...for Dust, published on June 26, 2001, may have a bearing on Johnson's quandry. The rapid 1918 U.S. coverage may be explainable by dust storm delivery. See: NASA's The Pacific Dust Express. This possibility is touched on in more detail in the Global Developments: Spring-Summer 2001 section of this article. Johnson's atmospheric change idea may have contributed to the "American suggestion" about an extraterrestrial source for influenza, to which Barber refers. (I don't have a source on this yet. Comments/inputs are welcome.) In 1907 S. Arrhenius, Scientific American 96:196, argued for direct propagation of life between planets by microbes hurled into near-planet space by storms, then propelled by radiation pressure. (No comets or meteorites required.) See: Possibility of Arrival of Living Organisms from Space Net Advance of Physics: Annotated Bibliographies, No. 1: Panspermia Theories Section III, 1996. In the article Influenza From Space? Sir Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe carry on a dialog with critics about comet tail delivery systems for extraterrestrial biological visitors. This would be consistent with the idea of panspermia, or life from outer space. These researchers found evidence which suggests that influenza (at least in the beginning of a given flu season) breaks out in a sporadic manner, but doesn't spread easily. This is not unlike Kolata's reported "hopscotching" effect. [Link removed to no longer existent page. 19 Jan 2007] Though not visible to the naked eye, the planet Venus has a comet-like tail that solar system scientists have been studying for years to gain improved insights into the nature of comets. (Most of this information is in hard copy and I don't currently have any references.) In their extensive on-line reprint of an article titled The Interaction of the Solar Wind with Venus C. T. Russell and O. Vaisberg suggest that "On the whole, the solar wind interaction with Venus is more comet-like than Earth-like." Barber reported "Following the 1937 outbreak, [at Lockyer Observatory] water samples were sent to the bacteriological department of the Seale-Hayne College, Newton Abbot, and tissue cultures were obtained. It was, however, found to be impossible to match these with any known strains of indigenous liquefying bacteria. The result was later independently confirmed by tests carried out at the Lister Institute." Since the proximate cause of death in the 1918-1919 pandemic was usually drowning brought on by what amounted to liquified lungs {air sacs riddled with seepage sites (Kolata, p. 27)} it might be of interest to check for relations between the findings of the Seale-Hayne College and Lister Institute studies (of the Lockyer liquifying agents) to any biological thugs preserved in the pandemic autopsy tissues. Everything discussed up to this point may be academic if Venus does not provide a suitable environment to nurture (or to allow the generation of) life forms, whether they be viral or bacterial. {Velikovsky(4) leaned toward more robust life-forms than these.} Looking at the viral aspect of the problem, it is generally held that influenza viruses need a dry environment to stay alive until they reach their hosts. Venus's upper atmosphere has been found to be extremely dry; so that door seems to stay open. The genes in viruses are generally comprised of RNA. A theory, according to Frank Shu(5), regarding the creation of life from inanimate matter requires the "creation of small organic molecules in a reducing (non-oxidizing) atmosphere via energetic natural phenomena: lightning strokes, the penetration of ultraviolet light, etc." Venus has the reducing atmosphere but very little Earth-like lightning has been detected to date. The Venera 11-14 and Pioneer Venus probes found very-low-frequency radio emissions (whistlers) which were thought to be associated with low altitude lightning, but a search for lighting on Venus in 1998 and 1999 using NASA's Cassini spacecraft did not detect high-frequency (static-like) radio wave evidence of lighting. On the other hand, the outer portion of Venus's atmosphere is richly bombarded with solar ultraviolet energy which can break down molecular bonds to produce the bits and pieces that form tougher molecules.. (As a side-bar, I suggest that since Venus has a very weak intrinsic magnetic field, charged particles in the solar wind and cosmic rays plowing into its upper mid latitudes atmosphere might constitute viable lightning substitutes for chemical mixing purposes.) Shu goes on to say, ". . . experiments carried out by Cyril Ponnamperuma and Carl Sagan, shining ultraviolet light on a dilute solution of adenine, ribose, and phosphoric acid, yielded large amounts of ATP. Presumably, the same process which joins the adenine to ribose to three phosphates to give ATP could join any of the three other bases, guaine, cytosine, and uracil, to ribose and three phosphates to give GTP, CTP, and UTP." If the Venusian atmosphere is found to be deficient in any of the atomic elements required for building all amino acids for RNA then we could eliminate Venus as the ultimate source of influenza organisms. The synthesis of ATP, for example, requires Carbon, Oxygen, Hydrogen, Nitrogen and Phosphorus. The upper atmosphere of Venus has these elements in measurable quantities. . . .