It's a small world after all

You've heard the phrase "It's such a small world," and it's true. You meet people that know people you know or have done things that you've done, etc. My small world occurrence is as such...I am starting a new rotation this quarter and I had lunch the other day with the post-doc with whom I'm working. We were talking about our various career paths (his obviously more extensive than mine), when we discovered that we both had worked at the CDC for a year in between college and graduate school. Low and behold it was the same fellowship program: Emerging Infectious Disease Training Fellowship! He was a Class III or IV fellow while I was a Class X. I've never met someone else who has done this fellowship outside of my immediate fellows and those that stuck around and got jobs at the CDC. Thus, it's so surprising that I should find one period, let alone one 3000 miles away from Atlanta and at the same university, in the same department and lab in which I currently find myself! Needless to say, we had a good time lamenting about the pitfalls of working in public health. Speaking of which, this post-doc, Gus is his name, had a newspaper clipping of great one-liners tapped up by his desk. The highlighted one was pretty funny and pretty apt as I used to work in the influenza branch on avian flu while at the CDC. It reads as follows: "If bird flu mutates to an easily transmitted human flu, as predicted by evolutionary theory, will the religionists who don't believe in evolution refuse the vaccine?" (Just to clarify things here, there is NO vaccine that works currently available despite what you here on the grapevine and a pandemic of avian influenza is a matter of when NOT a matter of if).