public transportation = vector

Due to my extensive education in microbiology, I often am thinking about life mostly in terms of the micro world.

What am I trying to say? I'm saying that I'm germophobic. I'm constantly thinking about what can and what will make me sick, as well as what can and will start the next global pandemic (because humans are many years overdue for one).

So, I'm usually worried about vectors in my daily life. Rats, water, and mosquitoes are the 3 biggest vectors in nature, that is to say that they are the top 3 disease causing agents.

Since I stay away from rats and the weather is such that there aren't very many mosquitoes in my life, the only remaining concern is H2O. The water I drink comes conveniently from the tap, so I guess that means it won't make me sick (unless some modern day terrorist puts LSD in it). So, water is not a concern to me because I live in a first world nation.

With water, rats, and bugs out of the equation, I am left to ponder what else is left that is a vector.

To make a long story short- it's MUNI! MUNI is very hazardous to my health. Public places like that (inanimate objects which become vectors and are called fomites) are going to be the method of transmission when virulent multi drug resistant strains of bacteria and newly mutated viruses begin to wreak havoc across metropolitan cities. This makes public transportation into a very important issue, for a public health standpoint.

What makes virus so much more incurable is how they mutate inside a host.

For example, say you got a little too carried away messing around with a sexual partner, and you ended up getting their blood in your mouth now have been infected with Hepatitis C. Hepatitis C is really an umbrella tern for the upwards of 20 million different strains of a virus (complete with subtle genetic differentiation basically making a virus "infinitely virulent") that you now have in your body forever.