Going Viral
Apr 25th, 2007 by Jinja
Going Viral
What did I wake up to this morning?
A text message. Forwarded repeatedly throughout the day, clogging up my phone. ‘Please forward to everyone you know’. Option: delete.
If cattle are dying so rapidly, it’d have to be some new disease – even hoof and mouth disease doesn’t work that fast. (And yes, it exists in Cambodia, just like bird flu.) So I rang up one of my friends in the press. Nope. Nothing official yet, though they’d been advised of the rumors.
If your food is thoroughly cooked, it’s going to be hard for a virus or bacterium to survive. And so far as I know about local farming practices, we don’t have prions to worry about. Who’s going to get hurt the most from this talk? Farmers, butchers, market vendors.
The rapid spread of rumors is sometimes called ‘viral’. The term’s been applied to ground level marketing via email and text messaging. I’m not going to directly forward on the message like it asks – the message IS the virus.
So I’m off for some food. I wouldn’t rule out Lok Lak. Think differently? Show me some real proof.
Wow, smart move on your part! This of course is a viral message sent to collect or destroy phone data. Thanks for the info.
Hi PJ B,
You’d need a pretty sophisticated phone to transmit a virus.
(I do have one Khmer friend who claims his phone got a virus. This was a really expensive phone though with many features. Essentially a mini-computer.)
The real virus is the rumor itself.
On a related note, one friend points out that cooking may not eliminate bacterial toxins, depending on the circumstances.
- J