Worst Flu Ever?

by Steve Cook

The world has at last finished reeling from the Bird Flu and Swine Flu epidemics that swept a swathe of carnage across the entire planet and almost killed dozens of people the world over.

Known as pandemics, they were widely believed to be worse than epidemics because they have the word “pan” in them and are named after animals.

They caused several pharmaceutical giants to reel ashen-faced from the torment of accidentally making lots of money from the sale of vaccines that caused the “lemming flu” armageddonodemic for which there is no known cure except not being injected with vaccines that contain antifreeze, lark’s vomit and ocelot spit even when told to by governments and other criminal conspiracies.

Just when the reeling seemed to be over and the Daily Scare, Ministry of Hysteria and other members of POCS (Profits Over Common Sense) have been left to guard dangerously diminished stocks of fear and other supplies essential to controlling people and other enemies of democracy, a new hero has ridden to the rescue out of the majestic – and, indeed, radioactive - sunset.

This latest mutation of the flu virus is so devastating in its effects and threatens to afflict so many people across the world and similar planets that scientists and health officials the world over have been sent scouring the deepest recesses of Roget's Thesaurus for a word to embrace the new disease with a fittingly chilling epithet.

Controversy is now raging throughout the scientific world over whether to call this new outbreak a catastrophodemic or a letsallcrapourpantsodemic or even a youmightaswellgiveupthewilltoliveodemic. All is not lost however: the scientific community remains confident that some sectors of the population will emerge in fine fettle from the worst disaster to blight humanity since the invention of the atom bomb or Monsanto and begin the job of repopulating the Earth with chemically enhanced voters.

Such sectors include, of course, pharmaceutical giants, manufacturing giants, food giants and other genetically modified corporations.

In order to counter the coming catastrophodemic, a new vaccine is being hastily prepared by crack teams of press release writers working flat out in bunkers buried deep beyond the dreams of avarice. Chemically indistinguishable from athlete’s foot powder – or, indeed, athlete’s foot – the new vaccine will be made available for the price of a nearly-new Ford Fiesta and by “available” we do, of course, mean compulsory.

The vaccine does have a few minor side effects. It causes brain atrophy in people who own shares in pharmaceutical companies, loss of impulse control by presidents and news editors and death. Proponents of the vaccine however point out that death only occurs in the case of people who inject, eat, drink, absorb or inhale the vaccine and all the deaths have occurred only in foreigners or people who would have stopped breathing eventually anyway.

The vaccine, known as Incense8, represents a major advance in vaccination technology, with the application to health care of a principle known to military leaders for centuries but hitherto only applied to invading armies, the working classes, the American Mid West and other enemies. Known as SEP, the Scorched Earth Principle, it is the process of rendering one’s territory unusable by an invading army (or indeed liberating army, landowners, tenants or, in fact, anybody should the invading army be defeated) its application has been extended to combating invasion of a host by a popular virus.

Incense8, thought to be effective in 100% of sales pitches, works on this SEP principle by rendering the human organism so ill that it becomes unattractive to any virus that happens by, in the way that a roach infested bungalow tends to be unattractive to a prospective squatter. The virus then goes elsewhere in search of a host more fit for viral habitation.

The new virus is – according to sufferers - right up there with leprosy and SARS, in fact in the league table of deadly killers, sits just below flu vaccines, processed foods and American foreign policy.

Its symptoms are reportedly pretty horrible to witness and at this stage can only be recognised by women. They include:


  • The sufferer become convinced that death is imminent and makes pathetic pleas for sympathy
  • Sufferer becomes unable to withstand even a mild headache or runny nose and retires to bed for a week or more of writhing in agony
  • Sufferer become insufferable
  • Women in the vicinity of the sufferer begin to roll their eyes and, in desperation, resort to sarcasm
  • Sufferer can often rally and make a miraculous recovery if the possibility of nookie is hinted at.
  • The sufferer can often be found going on line to compare symptoms with the symptoms of all known diseases and will often discover that he is suffering from any disease he reads about.
Reports are coming in that the new flu virus only attacks men. Woman appear to be immune.

In the light of the last fact, it was only inevitable that there would be a break with the tradition of naming epidemics after animals. 

The new “Alleged-Killer Virus” is known as the Man Flu.


Steve Cook is the author of Genghis Kant, a tongue-in-cheek sci fi spoof. See a current newspaper review here. Visit the Genghis Kant on Facebook for a free copy of Steve's latest story "Spilt Milk" of which one reader said: “Loved the Spilt Milk story. Loved the characters and how it all linked together.” 

Miracle Drug Solves Everything

The need to worry (or panic) is over.

Genetic scientists announced today that they have solved all the world’s problems.


The shock news was released this morning by Secretary of State for Mutant Affairs and Extinction Management, Jane Fibbs, as she triumphantly addressed the world via subliminal messages democratically imbedded into popular TV programmes such as Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares and Spot the Celebrity Brain.

She declared that, “The need for anyone to illegally doubt this government ever again is well and truly over thanks to the latest miracle breakthrough by researchers at the famous top secret Frankenstein Institute in Apocalypse, Missouri.”

This news comes as something of a surprise to dissident factions such as voters, the middle classes, the working classes and other ungrateful minorities who were convinced that geneticists had given them strange lumps, breathing difficulties and other unwanted irritations such as the New World Order.


But everybody’s troubles are now, probably, over and we can all look forward to a new Golden Age of nothing bad ever happening again thanks to the Frankenstein Institute’s $4,000 billion four-year research programme.


Code-named Project Completely Sensible, researchers engaged in an ambitious search for the solution to two of the world’s major problems: a shortage of elbow room on an over-populated planet and a shortage of money in the under-funded bank accounts of shareholders of the Frankenstein Institute.


The solution that the Institute’s dedicated team have come up with is widely reputed by experts all across the Frankenstein Institute to be so complete and fool-proof and without any known side-effects or consequences whatsoever that neither the government nor the pharmaceutical industry need worry.


This is so much the case that anyone who enters any negativity into the proceedings by writing sarcastic articles or scathing Facebook posts about it it will immediately be arrested by an elite squad of Green Berets, locked up in a psychiatric institution and have their brain re-wired with drugs.

To those of you who insist that such treatment is a tad harsh, Ms Fibbs retorted, “No, it isn’t.”


She then went on to explain that in any case, harbouring doubts about your democratically elected dictatorship is now illegal and those who insist that people have constitutional rights are reminded that, no they don’t. 


The Constitution was abolished last Tuesday by the Democratic Committee for the Abolition of the Constitution when it was proved beyond doubt by a press release from the office of the President that its content was largely seditious and ran contrary to the inalienable right of multinational corporations to be unconstitutional and/or wreck the planet. 

There will probably be a subliminal implant announcing this minor constitutional adjustment next year.

The President himself, speaking at the launch of the National Big Brother competition - in which the lives of all citizens will be secretly televised to an audience of Homeland Security specialists - took pause to congratulate the Frankenstein Institute for its “sterling work.”

President Stalin is renowned for being the world’s first cloned President and was genetically engineered in a laboratory in Zimbabwe to have no common sense.

He went on to say, “There are those who assert that the answer to the chaos and inefficiency that has made an under-populated and scarcely developed planet appear overcrowded is to run things better and stop being stupid. But we say there is no need to go to such extraordinary lengths when we have at our disposal the means to tinker recklessly with genes.”


And he added, “The Frankensteins have shown us the way forward. The answer to a world that appears small is to make human beings even smaller!”


The technological means to achieve the age-old goal of making human beings very small comes in the form of the “Lilliput Drug.”
Scientists noted that human beings, especially in America, have been getting larger and larger and predicted that by the year 2100 the average American male will be over 20 feet tall and almost as wide and weigh approximately three tons.


The strain on the Earth’s resources of increasingly large human bodies is obvious: larger bodies eat more food and drink more essential nutrients such as coffee and alcohol, require larger doses of drugs (or bullets) to sedate or kill them, need bigger cars and houses, use more toilet paper, take up more room and so on.


The answer to the problem is obvious: make human beings smaller. If, generation by generation, human beings could be genetically engineered to be progressively smaller in size, arriving over time at what is believed to be the ideal size for a human being – roughly four inches in height and five pounds in weight – massive savings will be made on the consumption of the Earth’s resources.


At those ideal dimensions, it has been calculated that the entire population of the planet could live comfortably on the Isle of Wight and be fed by the agricultural output of Angola.


In other words, as the size of human beings shrinks, the world will, from our perspective, seem to grow larger and larger until it corresponds with the relative size of Jupiter. This will give everyone a lot more elbow room.


There would be an added benefit in that labour will be a lot more comfortable for mothers giving birth to children who with each generation are roughly half the size of the previous generation.

This dream has now become achievable with the development of the Lilliput Pill. The pill was extensively tested on elephants at the New York City Zoo and the results of those experiments will be on display to the public as soon as the so-called “Lilliput Elephants” can be coaxed out from under the sofa in the manager’s office.


The new wonder drug, which has to be taken daily from birth until old age or compulsory sterilisation (whichever is the sooner) will soon be tested on humans by making it available on prescription or over the counter at drug stores.


Next year, consumption of the Lilliput Drug will be made compulsory for all citizens and those who decline gently persuaded to see the error of their ways by being locked up without trial. The government insists that this measure is not undemocratic as it merely weeds out those who disagree with the government, a measure which any person in his right mind and not a terrorist sympathiser must agree with.


Those necessarily exempt for the new compulsory shrinkage will be, among others, the owners of multinational corporations, government officials, the military and the police. All these will be permitted to retain their current size.


It is thus believed that when all other people are four inches or less in height, it will be easier for the forces of law and order to literally stamp out dissent and/or terrorism. And thus save on the cost of bullets.


The only known, mild side effects anyone need not worry about at all - apart from being trodden on by government officials - will be being chased by cats or carried off by starlings.

However to combat such fears, scientists at the Brain-u-Like Institute have announced a solution. They have discovered the existence of a hitherto unknown mental illness called TAD (Tiny Aversion Disorder) and developed a drug which will render anyone carried off by starlings, eaten by voles or mown down by stampeding cockroaches inordinately happy about the whole experience.


Related News
“Human Shrinkage plans do not go far enough,” says controversial group. The UK-based “Miniscule Society”, an extremist offshoot of the AMF, the American Mini-me Federation, today poured scorn on the government’s plans to reduce humans to four inches in height. Posting on Facebook just before he was arrested by a nine-hundred-strong force of FBI agents backed up by tanks and surface-to-surface missiles, a spokesperson for the group accused the government of a conspiracy to deny people their inalienable rights to be very tiny indeed. Claiming that if human beings were reduced to the height of one millimetre the entire population of the world could live in a single fallout shelter and consume just one tin of spam per day . . . ” [continued on page 1187]

Steve Cook is the author of Genghis Kant, a tongue-in-cheek sci fi spoof. See a current newspaper review here. Visit the Genghis Kant on Facebook for a free copy of Steve's latest story "Spilt Milk" of which one reader said: “Loved the Spilt Milk story. Loved the characters and how it all linked together.”