Sometimes, having to talk specifically about what is in the news means that it is almost impossible to write without irony. A disease that kills one in ten million each year was being given headlines the size of which might have been warranted by the start of a war. But when it comes to the crunch, even the BBC News ends up being tabloid led, because if they can get the masses talking about it, then like it or not - it's news.

From the bowels of England they have come north and crossed the border, sneaking up in the night like the butcher Cumberland, to spread death and devastation, and I'm not even talking politics. Another long hot Glasgow summer is approaching, and a newspaper headline really needs a certain something if it's to attract the attention of the locals.

There isn't much in the news that affects us, war famine and death seem quite remote. Half a million dead in the Rwanda genocide, but Bosnia's been in the news for years now, and clearly genocide has become boring.

Neither is Famine ad-man sexy anymore. There's only so many starving babies you can look at on TV, and not many of ours have bellies swollen with hunger - even if we do see rickets and malnutrition returning.

What we need to grab the headlines is a threat that can't be seen, which strikes anywhere at any time, with rapidity and fatality. If it can be described with all the horror of a Stephen King novel or a science fiction movie, even better.

That's it, a national alert for the attack of the killer microbes. Something lying dormant in everybody all the time, just waiting for a weakness in the immune system (associating it with AIDS and thoughts of plague) allowing it to mutate into a super bug, the invasion of the deadly mutant flesh-eating bacterium, or as the men in the white coats call it necrotising fasciitis.

What we are looking for is a little fear, something scary but quite safe, like a horror movie. A terrible disease that only strikes at one in ten million every year. But most of us prefer not to look at what is really scary, the source of war and the cause of famine inside ourselves, the four horsemen of the Apocalypse and the seven deadly sins.

The seed of evil is in us all, waiting, dormant, and when it gets out it consumes us just as surely as necrotising fasciitis. So fear God, wherever you are, said the Prophet, and follow up a bad deed with a good one and it will wipe it out, and behave well towards other people.