A laboratory experiment had successfully polymerised H2O so that each molecule was linked to its neighbour.

The fear was that this fancy water would escape the lab and get into our dams and therefore into our bodies and the 70 per cent or so of our body that was an aqueous filler and lubricant would suddenly have the chemical properties of, say, graphite or a low viscosity motor oil.

The affect on one’s health can only be imagined . . . and, thankfully, that’s all we have to do.

It may have been an April Fools joke that had better-than-usual coverage, because I’ve not heard a word of it since.

It was, however, one of the many tiny mutations and microbes, real or imagined, that grip us with fear and confront our mortality.

Enter swine flu – or its somewhat more benign medical term, the H1N1 virus or, even better, novel influenza A.

Sounds far less deadly, doesn’t it. Almost a symphony in that last description.

Again, back in the ’70s, the term global village was coined; as much a term to get people to take responsibility for the big picture as it was to express the growing accessibility of our planet.

Mathematically, global village plus swine flu (or any similar bug) equals nowhere to hide.

So, an outbreak becomes a pandemic faster than you can distribute Tamiflu.

People’s responses run the scale from reckless indifference to paranoid isolation.

Back in time again, arriving at the airport for a flight back from Paris in 2003, at the height of the SARS virus, we were greeted with face masks to wear on the flight.

Coincidently, French baggage handlers decided that day to protest their lot and walked off the job, so a 9:30am flight became a somewhere about 2pm flight.

Some waiting for the flight had the mask on for every minute and one women, who was not seen for the entire flight and we speculate might have isolated herself in the lavatory, still had a mask on when we emerged from the plane in Sydney, countless hours beyond the effective life of a mask and interrupted by two hours in Singapore airport.