But few epidemiologists think that such luck can last, or that there won't be another global pandemic — perhaps a more deadly form of the flu, or an entirely new virus.
"The land was enough to excite any man's lust, and perhaps emotions more deadly," H. W. Brands writes at the opening of "Lone Star Nation," a balanced, unromanticized account of the settlement, rebellion and eventual statehood of Texas.
In politics, perhaps the only thing more deadly than denial is defeatism.
It could reemerge anytime, perhaps in an even more deadly or contagious form, they said.
How effective they have been is open to debate; the United States and its close partner in the attacks, Israel, used the weapons as an alternative to a potentially far more deadly, but perhaps less effective, bombing attack from the air.
But perhaps thinking so is just another, more deadly sort of hubris.
"It is often asserted that, since the nineteen-sixties or nineteen-seventies, the government of Israel has secretly maintained its own nuclear deterrent, consisting of dozens of deadly nuclear bombs, or perhaps more.
That multiplied the risk of human infections, he added, and of the virus mutating, perhaps by attaching itself to human flu, and becoming far more deadly.
It was a crime that, perhaps more than any other in recent memory, spoke to America's deadly and debilitating fascination with guns.
And that raises perhaps the most important question of all: What if the cure to our mortgage crisis is more deadly than the disease itself?
