Does a weasel by any other name smell as sweet?

I've recently become a consumer of results from various Google Alerts. Much of the time, there's very little worth noting from the obscure searches I've set up. Today, however, I hit the quirky jackpot. Or at least gained new respect for the sort of non-news that gets reported from the truly wide world of weird out there. If you want to know how "mink" and "Washington" showed up in the Google newsy algorithms today, click on through to this little nugget. The title "Acquittal in Dead Weasel Assault" only provides part of the story. I expect the remainder will be left to a team of screenwriters to fully flesh out once the rights are sold. Remember, you heard it here first. Or second, if you read what I read daily.

Found fish freak-out

If you have anything to do with fishing or the consumption of fish, the recent news of a disease being spotted in Pacific wild salmon in the general vicinity of the Northwest has to freak you out. That is, it should - if you listen to the experts and the front page news in Seattle over the past week. The concern is a disease called "infectious salmon anemia" or ISA. It has devastated farmed Atlantic salmon populations in Scandinavia and South America. This is the first time it's been seen in North America. Once it shows up, fish act like normal but then die in droves. It lands on my conversational plate not only because I consume wild salmon like a family of brown bears. I'm also becoming attuned to the problems of these sorts of animal industry disease threats. Some well-informed readers might suggest the mental leap to link ISA with "mad cow disease" in terms of separate but equal threats. But what little I know allows even me to see that's a tough epidemiological stretch to make. The link is true, however, in the fact that such diseases share the characteristic of being able to devastate an industry. No matter what you may think about animal industries, these viral threats can knock the snot out of a population. Plus for me, the larger point comes around metaphorically, given that I've been looking at another industry-specific disease with quite similar and equally devastating effects ("aleutian disease virus" or ADV). Which leads me to ask if other examples come to mind. Just yell 'em out - I'd love to hear them. Or we can all just freak out separately, as we fill our respective bomb shelters with wild salmon jerky and vancomycin.