ATLANTA - Tens of thousands are dead and millions soon will be as a pandemic spreads across America and around the world, say epidemiologists at the Centers for Disease Control. The long feared global viral pandemic has started -- but it is of a completely different nature and origin than had been predicted, according to said Dr. Stephen Wasserman, a California-based medical epidemiologist.
The pandemic did not begin as expected from an influenza virus jumping from poultry to swine to humans. The pandemic appears instead to be of purely human origin, beginning with a cutting-edge Internet marketing firm's move to get cross-discipline synergy by combining genetic and software engineering in a viral product promotion.
What went awry was an attempt to produce more a more effective e-mail spam by splicing the DNA sequences which produce the delectable smell of filet mignon cooking into digital photographs of processed meat. The combination was designed to produce an irresistible image -- and it did.
The bulk e-mail sent out was so effective that untold numbers of computer users have starved to death as they could not bring themselves to move from in front of their computer screens where they were left transfixed, staring images of slices of Spam® meat products. So enamored were they of the product that they forwarded the image to everyone in their address books, creating a massive chain-reaction that slowed and clogged network arteries around the world.
The marketers had intended the Spam® spam experiment, though based on an insider joke, to be a legitimate test of the technology.
CDC scientists say the only way they even know what happened is that a few of the spam victims escaped temporarily as the computers they were working on were shorted out by drool or stopped working when the laptop batteries gave out.
Sadly, even those individuals did not ultimately survive, as they returned to new Internet connections as soon as they could.
"This is definitely going to make people sit up and take notice," said Charles J. Wysocki of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. "This is a lot worse than the potbellies that came from getting hooked on store-bought canned Spam. A lot worse."
The superspam project grew out of an effort to resurrect aborted research into Smell-O-Vision technology started in the late 1950's which a historian of media engineering had stumbled upon while investigating early attempts to create 3-D TV.
Geographically, researchers say, the pandemic originated in Kirkland, Washington, where spread from a source at Bardo-Brooks Marketing. Ken Brooks, Internet-marketing consultant at Bardo-Brooks, said the test was going great, then it started going "too great."
According to Brooks, the virtual spam jumped the company's super-secure firewall during internal testing when an intern took a DVD of super-spamiated photographs back to his dorm at Lake Washington Technical College to "show his roommates what he did this summer."
From that moment the pandemic had escaped "from Pandora's box and wasn't going to be put back in," said Micheal Slack, senior analyst for Jupiter Communications, an online-research firm.
Biological scientists for decades have cautioned that genetic engineering experiments with bacteria and viruses could slip out of control, letting loose virulent strains of deadly diseases for which humans had no natural immunity. There had even been the unsubstantiated rumors that the HIV virus which causes AIDS was such an event -- except that the HIV "escape" was planned, said conspiracy theorists.
Similar warnings about viral marketing were also assumed to have been from crackpots and have never been taken seriously, said Slack.
Viral marketing uses pre-existing social networks to produce exponential increases in brand awareness, through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of a computer virus. Viral marketing can be delivered by "word-of-mouse" then enhanced online as it harnesses the network effect of the Internet spreading multiplicatively, reaching a large number of people in very short period of time.
Experts fear that the only hope for the human race is that the pandemic will literally die out -- not just that every person exposed to the DNA-enhanced spam will die but that their hard drives will burn out as well -- before everyone in the world is exposed to it.
This is first recorded lethal outbreak caused by viral marketing, said Dr. Wasserman, and unfortunately may be the last.
Copyright 2006 Douglas Salguod
