I refer to the Malaysiakini report 'Suspected H1NI flu case in Sarawak' .

Instead of levelling off, the threat of the swine flu (in Malaysia, we are asked to be politically correct and only use the code A [H1N1]) has actually increased and the World Health Organisation (WHO) said it might raise the alert level to six and declare a pandemic.

This could be similar to the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 which killed about 100 million people worldwide. This is scary stuff indeed.

Even since the world got smaller and smaller during which the people of this planet got to know each other better (or worse through conflict and wars and exploitation), the world has certainly become a dangerous place.

But for those from the exploiting nations, they would say that it has become a 'better' place.

You don't have to be a rocket scientist or a quantum physicist to see that throughout the history of the human race. It has been nothing but a catalogue of cheating, conning, exploiting, displacing and annihilating each other, sometimes the result of which is that a new race is born.

I have just watched a two-hour History Channel programme on Christopher Columbus sailing to the Americas in search of gold and spices and to convert the Native Indians to Christianity.

These Native Indians welcomed these 'white men', giving them food and shelter as they thought they were just visitors. But what did they get?

These intruders were after their gold, their land, their women and had no qualms about getting rid of them. So what else is new?

The British, the Dutch, the Portuguese and other colonial powers were all the same but who could blame them because they too were subjects of the same atrocities by their own colonial powers like the Vikings, the Romans, etc.

And this process is going to go on and on because that's the way it has always been. For instance, countries like Israel and Singapore are viewed as modern-day colonial powers.

Thus can we blame North Korea, Cuba and Myanmar for closing their borders and getting on with their meagre life free from McDonald's and Coca-Cola and the lifestyles that go with these closed-economies?

Still, despite all the threats of diseases like the swine flu, Sars, Aids etc, Malaysia loves to tell the world that we are the most open country in the world.

When it comes to tourism, we welcome anybody, including those who are here to commit crimes, recruit our women as their drug mules not to mention bringing with them all kinds of diseases. Indeed, their sheer numbers can be a threat to our national security.

In light of all these, can't we have a stricter rules on tourism by being a bit more selective? Such as the the Himalayan state of Bhutan which only admits 'quality tourists' in order to protect its environment.

It does worry me when our leaders tend to echo the arguments of low-cost airlines and players in the tourism trade that the industry contributes a lot to our gross domestic product and employs a lot of people.

If that is the philosophy, then we might as well put into place the final piece of the tourism industry jigsaw i.e. Thailand and promote Malaysia as a sex capital (to some extent, it is already happening).

After all, we can't compete with Singapore and Indonesia for shopping or Thailand and China for golf.