Foot-And-Mouth Believed To Be First Virus Unable To Spread
Through Microsoft Outlook
Atlanta, Ga. (SatireWire.com) ñ Scientists at the Centers for Disease
Control and Symantec's AntiVirus Research Center today confirmed that
foot-and-mouth disease cannot be spread by Microsoft's Outlook email
application, believed to be the first time the program has ever failed to
propagate a major virus.
"Frankly, we've never heard of a virus that couldn't spread through
Microsoft Outlook, so our findings were, to say the least, unexpected," said
Clive Sarnow, director of the CDC's infectious disease unit.
The study was immediately hailed by British officials, who said it will save
millions of pounds and thousands of man hours. "Up until now we have, quite
naturally, assumed that both foot-and-mouth and mad cow were spread by
Microsoft Outlook," said Nick Brown, Britain's Agriculture Minister. "By
eliminating it, we can focus our resources elsewhere."
However, researchers in the Netherlands, where foot-and-mouth has recently
appeared, said they are not yet prepared to disqualify Outlook, which has
been the progenitor of viruses such as "I Love You," "Bubbleboy," "Anna
Kournikova," and "Naked Wife," to name but a few.
Said Nils Overmars, director of the Molecular Virology Lab at Leiden
University: "It's not that we don't trust the research, it's just that as
scientists, we are trained to be skeptical of any finding that flies in the
face of established truth. And this one flies in the face like a blind drunk
sparrow."
Executives at Microsoft, meanwhile, were equally skeptical, insisting that
Outlook's patented Virus Transfer Protocol (VTP) has proven virtually
pervious to any virus. The company, however, will issue a free VTP patch if
it turns out the application is not vulnerable to foot-and-mouth.
Such an admission would be embarrassing for the software giant, but Symantec
virologist Ariel Kologne insisted that no one is more humiliated by the
study than she is. "Only last week, I had a reporter ask if the
foot-and-mouth virus spreads through Microsoft Outlook, and I told him,
'Doesn't everything?'" she recalled. "Who would've thought?"
