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Scientists prove everyone on planet ‘already dead’

Scientists are today advising anyone worried about the unstoppable spread of killer plagues to sit down, pour a large brandy and forget about it.

Why? Because the human race has already been wiped out.

The astonishing statement follows epidemiologists' warnings that Hepatitis C would become the new AIDS, ravaging populations and laying waste to entire civilisations.

However, an international symposium's conclusion that the virus' effect will be minimal is irrelevant since new data reveals the human race is extinct.

"Yup, it's true," trumpeted one doctor. "We took all of the predicted death tolls from killer plagues for the last 30 years, and when we projected the totals, it became clear that the last human individual died at around 3.30pm GMT on 28 December 2001."

An authority on killer plague predictions told The Rockall Times: "The statistics are pretty convincing. In 1982 scientists noted that by 1995 there would only one small boy and an elderly couple left alive in the whole of continental Africa. Aids would have done for the rest.

"Two years ago the deaths of tens of people from Ebola led to convincing arguments that this flesh-eating plague would reduce humanity to a few scattered tribes of primitive hunter-gatherers living in caves within ten years.

"And then there was anthrax, a virus so potent that were it, for instance, to be delivered in a powdered form through the mail, it could kill everyone in the United States in a matter of minutes."

The scientists' conclusions are all the more remarkable in that they do not include projected casualty figures for other recently-punted nightmare apocalypse scenarios, such as an asteroid hitting the earth and plunging it into an eternal hellish winter. Neither do the effects of global warming and Arabs crashing planes into skyscrapers feature in the calculations.

"That's right," noted one shaken scientist. "If we take all of the available figures and project an extinction point from those, we find that mankind would not have survived long enough even to discover that we were at risk in the first place. It's a chilling thought."

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