First Germany, then Austria? Is Bird Flu the next Hitler or something?

Just in keep you’re keeping score, Bird Flu has spread to cats in Austria.

Germany… Austria…. hrm… if this were Hitler, next would be Poland…

Poland reported its first outbreak of bird flu on Monday, saying laboratory tests confirmed two wild swans died of the disease. Polish authorities have implemented a set of European Union precautionary measures for dealing with a bird flu outbreak. Those measures include keeping poultry indoors within two miles of an outbreak and intensifying checks on any meat leaving the area.

Ach! Bird Flu is the next Hitler!

If there’s one thing you can count on, it’s that people in America won’t over-react to this news and start a Dark Ages style campaign to wipe out cats because of some plague or another. Nor will shady faux-pharmaceutical companies try to sell you sugar pills as if they were Bird Flu cures, or other gimmick-peddlers marketing hoax preventitives or Bird Flu Blockers.

I mean, it’s not like some lone nutball is trying to poison newspapers and television news anchors with Anthrax, thus causing the publishing, broadcast, and government sector to care the crap out of everyone when it’s really just them that are the target, not the public at large.

Unless, of course, cats owned by newspaper moguls, magazine publishers, television executives, and members of Congress start wobbling weirdly and coughing up things. Then I fully expect TIME and Newsweek to try to out-shriek the Big Three Networks (CNN, Fox, and ESPN) when it comes to panicking the public into a mass slaughter of the feline kind.

So, what color ribbon has been reserved for Bird Flu Victims? What color rubber wristband will we be expected to wear? Shall we stick “Support Our Flocks” on our SUVs?