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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (28330)	2/7/2004 10:20:36 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793914

Lets keep this "Bird Flu" talk in perspective. It could be a lot worse than the Media is saying. "MIlitary History." The Influenza Pandemic of 1918 The influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 killed more people than World War I. With approximately one-fifth of the world’s population infected, over 20 million people lost their lives, making this event the most devastating epidemic in recorded world history. By way of comparison, more people died of influenza in a single year than in four-years of the Black Death from 1347 to 1351. In the United States, approximately 675,000 Americans died. On the Western Front, 116,708 U.S. soldiers lost their lives – and over half of them fell to the influenza virus and not in combat (combat 53,513 disease/other = 63,195 ). The origins of the deadly flu disease were unknown but widely speculated upon. Some individuals believed that the epidemic was a direct result of a new biological weapon of the Germans. Others concluded that it was a result of the trench warfare, the use of mustard gases and the generated "smoke and fumes" of the war. However, new clues have recently been discovered as to why the 1918 flu epidemic was so virulent. The research, conducted separately by scientists at the Scripps Institute in La Jolla, California, and at Britain's Medical Research Council, used lung samples preserved from victims of the 1918 flu to reconstruct a protein crucial to their infection. Here they determined that the strain was more birdlike than once thought. Regardless of the cause, the results were tremendous. With the close of 1918, the world felt that it was truly facing the four horsemen of the apocalypse. However, the Journal of the American Medical Association final edition of 1918 offered a glimmer of optimism: "The 1918 has gone: a year momentous as the termination of the most cruel war in the annals of the human race; a year which marked, the end at least for a time, of man's destruction of man; unfortunately a year in which developed a most fatal infectious disease causing the death of hundreds of thousands of human beings. Medical science for four and one-half years devoted itself to putting men on the firing line and keeping them there. Now it must turn with its whole might to combating the greatest enemy of all--infectious disease," (12/28/1918). militaryhistory.about.com