Captain Trips, is that you?

So the first case of a highly drug-resistant strain of tuberculosis hit the United States the other day. Or at least it was announced for the first time the other day. It actually was discovered a bunch of months back when a 19-year-old visiting student from Peru was diagnosed with it in Florida.

The strain, called XXDR, is highly-contagious, aggressive and almost completely resistant to the standard antibiotic treatments. It's so rare that only a handful of cases have been identified world-wide thus far. I guess we've been pretty luck to this point with containing the spread of this particular strain of a disease that still kills about 2 million people every year.  And that's the old strain.  You know, the one that can actually be treated with antibiotics.  

Great.

This is the kind of thing that keeps me up at night. Not terror attacks, financial collapse or the new Nic Cage movie.  But good old Mother Nature deciding that there are two many humans on the planet and she needs to do something about it.  Like re-introducing an old enemy who has gone back to school and learned a few new tricks.

I like to keep optimistic and I have a lot of confidence in the medical community to fight fire with fire when it comes to tackling these infectious diseases, viruses and bacterium.  But if it happens again it won't be the first time that mankind gets it's collective ass kicked by something so small that it can't be seen without a microscope.

And it probably won't be the last time, either.  If we are lucky.

So, um, Happy Tuesday y'all.

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Note: Remember to play the Bug-Eyed Trivia Challenge every day. This is how it begins in those sci-fi flicks, anyway.