With Bird Flu, the Chickens Have Come Home to Roost

Illustration by Sue Coe.

In Albert Camus’ novel, The Plague, set in the French Algerian town of Oran, rats one day begin showing up dead on residents’ doorsteps, dying with violent spasms and blood pouring from their mouths.

At first, the rats’ death agonies are only a curiosity to the townspeople.  But then the rats begin dying in greater numbers, their corpses piling up in the streets. “The staircase from the cellar to the attics was strewn with dead rats, ten or a dozen of them.