They are all terrified now

On Friday I told my 7th graders about this. It's a not-so-funny coincidence that this is happening right now, because I have to read a young-adult novel for one of my grad classes, and the one that my group and I chose is Hole in the Sky by Pete Hautman. It's basically about a flu pandemic that has killed most of the world's population by 2028. I have been reading it to my 7th graders every morning, to settle them down, and now something similar is happening in the news. In the book, those who survive the flu are called "Survivors" and usually end up losing all of their hair. Yesterday, when I told them about the swine flu, one of the girls asked, "Does that mean that we're all going to lose our hair??"