Word: contagion
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...going to get a $400,000 mortgage; the mortgage broker who knows good and well that the mortgage isn't a suitable one but who passed it up the line to Wall Street; the ratings agencies who put AAA ratings on those packages. It was like a contagion that spread all over the world. But it was rooted in greed, at every level, all the way up the line. (See pictures of the global financial crisis...
...H1N1 outbreak. The CDC website says that "very little is known about the benefits" of wearing masks during a pandemic, and that the best preventive steps are frequent hand-washing and covering one's mouth when coughing or sneezing. Along with these strategies, the most effective techniques for preventing contagion are so-called social-distancing measures, such as closing schools, churches, theaters and other public gatherings, and generally keeping people apart from one another - efforts that may be further encouraged by the presence of face masks...
...Fears of a pandemic can also create enmity between once-cooperative countries over who was to blame for the contagion, which could touch off a powder keg in sensitive areas like the Taiwan Strait or Palestine. In addition, the blame for the disease may take on an ethnic or racial component. In the U.S., swine flu has already encouraged latent racism against Latinos to bubble to the surface. For organizations where keeping calm is a daily struggle, like prisons, pandemic panic can lead to riots or even murders...
...while the insurgency in Chechnya has been subdued over the past two years by Kadyrov's aggressive tactics, violence is on the rise in neighboring republics. "The contagion has spread to surrounding areas," says Aslan Doukaev, director of the North Caucasus service for independent Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. "The rebel movement and anti-Russian sentiment has spread across the North Caucasus, even into [neighboring] Ingushetia, which used to be loyal...
Christakis and his colleague James Fowler at the University of California, San Diego, are now studying happiness contagion in perhaps the largest social network of all, Facebook. They noticed that people who smiled in their Facebook profile pictures tended to have other friends who smiled. This might simply be peer pressure at work, with members feeling obliged to flash a smile to fit in with the rest of the group, but Christakis and Fowler are investigating whether there isn't a more infectious phenomenon at work...