However, as the parents of any small child know, it is the young who bring pestilence into the home.

ECONOMIST: Flu vaccination

An island-full of identical individuals could be wiped out by an infection, just as entire crops of genetically identical plants may succumb to plague and pestilence.

ECONOMIST: Ecology: Sisterhood is hungry | The

Speculators circle oil and gold like buzzards sniffing financial pestilence.

FORBES: Bernanke Plus Obama Equals $5 Gas Post Election

True, it is more difficult to operate in hot climates than in temperate ones, and disease and pestilence do nothing for labour productivity, but these are hardly spellbinding insights.

ECONOMIST: Growth and geography

Simon's fact-filled books and essays convincingly ridiculed these heirs of Reverend Thomas Malthus, an 18th-century economist who wrote a widely read tract predicting pestilence and famine as population growth outstripped the capacity to grow food.

FORBES: Fact and Comment