Pt 1: Health Workers - As you've been hearing on the news, pigs at an Alberta farm have caught the same swine flu strain that is affecting people in parts of Canada and across approximately 20 countries.

Pt 2: Virus Hunter - For thirty years, whenever a new virus popped up in the world, C.J. Peters took note. Quite often, he would take off after it, seeking out emerging infectious diseases to identify them, track them to their source and contain them. He is known to many as one of the scientists who fought the Ebola virus outbreak that was chronicled in the 1994 best seller The Hot Zone. C.J. Peters is a former U.S. Army Colonel and the former Chief Physician with the Special Pathogens Branch of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. He's also the author of Virus Hunter: Thirty Years of Battling Hot Viruses Around the World. C.J. Peters was in Houston, Texas.

Pt 3: Wild Blue - The blue whale is the largest animal to have ever lived on earth - bigger than dinosaurs. For those who have seen one, it's awe-inspiring but even though blue whales still live on planet earth, we don't know much more about them than we do about dinosaurs.

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It's Monday May 4th.

Secret Service officers closed part of a street near the White House because of security concerns about a bicycle locked to a pole and left unattended.

Currently, after being slapped, pushed through a fake wall, dunked in water and left alone in a box with an insect, the CIA confirmed the bike in question is a 10 speed.

This is The Current.

Health Workers

As you've been hearing on the news, pigs at an Alberta farm have caught the same swine flu strain that is affecting people in parts of Canada and across approximately 20 countries.

Officials say a farmhand who travelled to Mexico and became ill on his return apparently infected some pigs with the H1N1 influenza. For some perspective on what that might mean, we were joined by David Waltner-Toews, a veterinarian and epidemiologist who teaches in the Department of Population Medicine at the University of Guelph, and the president of Veterinarians Without Borders Canada. He is also the author of The Chickens Fight Back: Pandemic Panics and Deadly Diseases that Jump From Animals to People. He was in Kitchener, Ontario

Health Workers Panel

We aired a clip with CBC's Jen Moss speaking to a volunteer and visitors at the emergency ward of Vancouver General Hospital over the weekend. Despite all the hand washing and hand wringing, there are 101 confirmed cases of the new strain of swine flu in Canada.

And across the country, health care workers are confronting a number of dilemmas related to the outbreak. Among them ... How to treat the multitude of health issues their patients present to them even as swine flu threatens to eclipse everything else. And how to give the best possible care to their patients without compromising their own health and safety.

For a sense of what they're facing, we were joined by Ross Upshur. He's a doctor in the family practice at Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto. He's also the director of the Joint Centre for Bioethics at the University of Toronto and the Canada Research Chair in Primary Care Research. He was in Toronto.

Tanya Penney is the Health Services Manager and a nurse in the Emergency Department at Hants Community Hospital in Windsor, Nova Scotia. She's also responsible for the hospital's flu assessment clinic and she was in Windsor, Nova Scotia.

And Davidicus Wong is a family doctor in Burnaby, British Columbia.

Virus Hunter

For thirty years, whenever a new virus popped up in the world, C.J. Peters took note. Quite often, he would take off after it, seeking out emerging infectious diseases to identify them, track them to their source and contain them. He is known to many as one of the scientists who fought the Ebola virus outbreak that was chronicled in the 1994 best seller The Hot Zone. C.J. Peters is a former U.S. Army Colonel and the former Chief Physician with the Special Pathogens Branch of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. He's also the author of Virus Hunter: Thirty Years of Battling Hot Viruses Around the World. C.J. Peters was in Houston, Texas.

Wild Blue

The blue whale is the largest animal to have ever lived on earth - bigger than dinosaurs. For those who have seen one, it's awe-inspiring but even though blue whales still live on planet earth, we don't know much more about them than we do about dinosaurs.

In fact, one of the only things humans have really managed to figure out about blue whales is how to kill them in huge numbers. Today, all researchers can do is try to fill in the gaps and hope that our ignorance of blue whales turns out to be less lethal than decades of whaling.

The quest to understand blue whales better and to rectify the harm humans have done to them is at the heart of Dan Bortolotti's new book. He's a Canadian science writer. His book is called Wild Blue: A Natural History of the World's Largest Animal. Dan Bortolotti was with Anna Maria in our Toronto studio.

Last Word - The Mighty River

We left you with one more thought about whales, courtesy of Canadian artist Frédéric Back. In 1993, he made a film called The Mighty River, an epic journey through the history of the St. Lawrence River. Here's an excerpt from it. It begins underwater and takes us back to a time when, according to Frédéric Back, sailors used to complain that there were too many whales.