Fever

Today the news headlines in Delhi blasted out one salient point - that the mercury in the capital region had touched a whopping 43.5 degrees centigrade (111 degrees fahrenheit) on April 29th 2009. It was recorded as the hottest day in 51 years! Amazingly enough... I was out on this day and I did feel the heat (literally).

Why I write about it on my blog is because of another related news story that followed on page 15 of the paper in the International section. The author, reporting from Tromsoe, Norway, reported that the northern ice front of the Wilkins Ice Shelf has become unstable and the ice shelf has started to collapse. The area is 700 sq km of ice - almost the size of New York city - and was part of the Wilkins Ice Shelf in the Antarctic Peninsula.

Al Gore in his documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, talks about relationships between various climatic changes across the world. One thing that hasn't been highlighted though is the link between environmental degradation and the rise of new diseases - such as the swine flu that has recently emerged.

How did a disease that earlier never was transmitted between pigs and humans suddenly emerge as harmful to us? As per latest reports, 150 people have died in Mexico and 1 person has died in the United States. All over the world, countries have started to quarantine suspected swine flu patients. It all resembles some Michael Crichton novel... but the scary thing is, that this is now becoming a reality.

I don't have any kids, but I sometimes do wonder about the kind of world we'll be leaving our next generation.