Every few weeks Dailykos, the site I love dearly, picks a topic of the day and proceeds to lose its collective mind over it. Today apparently we're back to Avian flu. It drives me nuts to read crap like "Critics may say the avian flu probably won't be a pandemic but EVERYONE agrees one will happen some day!" Its also commonly accepted that the sun is going to blow up one day, and before then we'll probably get hit by a space rock so big that not even Bruce Willis can save us. Rational people don't go running around building anti-ateroid bunkers.
My wife has her PhD in bio so maybe I'll coax her into giving the probabilities talk on this being the BIG one rather than it being the next toxic mold, SARS, Pig Flu, shark attack story the media picks scare us into watching the evening news. But my main bitch is people constantly bringing up the 1918 flu as if that has ANY bearing on the world today.
Details below.
I wanted to be a historian when I grew up, even went for my PhD until I figured out how old I'd be when the student loans all got paid off, so I dropped out and got a real job. But my focus was military history, especially WWI, and especially chem warfare. That dovetails nicely with biowarfare so I've read a good deal about that too. So lemme just break down the context of what everyone is screaming their heads off over.
1918 was such a unique case in human history than comparisons are meaningless. You had millions upon millions of men from all over the world (French and Brits brought in all the colonial troops they could grab.) Living in extremely close quarters, with only the most basic sanitation facilities if any at all. Almost everyone was immuno suppressed from poor diet, stress, lack of sleep, cold, and constant immersion in the shit/mud/piss/debris slurry at the bottom of the trenches.
They brought viruses from all over the world at a time when international travel other than emmigration was still rare. They sat in that hell on earth for four years. The viruses mixed like crazy, swapping genes, each dominant mutation spreading like crazy through the immno suppressed ranks on both sides of the front. Troops probably had a better chance of killing the enemy by coughing loudly in the direction of the enemy lines than the did by going "over the top."
The viruses were constantly adapting to immune systems that could barely fight back enough to stay standing. As a result at least one, the 1918 flu, became immune to almost every set of immuno-responses present in the human population. The troops had time to adjust to the mutations over time. Their loved ones and neighbors at home wouldn't be so lucky.
Then one day the world decided that it was a good time to stop all the madness and the fighting stopped. All the troops who weren't French or German marched to ports, were loaded on unheated cargo and transport ships and were shipped home all at once (relatively speaking.)
The poor immuno supressed, virus ridden survivors stuffed into the holds of the transport ships are more analagous to plague rats entering italy in the 1200's than airline passengers today. They brought home a wave of new viri that had never been seen in the home countries before.
The 1918 flu hit so massively b/c it didn't spread via normal patterns. Returning soliders went to almost every corner of the globe. In the US outbreaks occurred in almost every city at near the same time, Philly catching the worse of it if I remember right. Health systems as we understand them were non existant, stand alone hospitals were quickly overwhelmed.
Never in human history as a population so heavily infected spread so quickly through a population so unprepared immunologically. The only real comparison is the introduction of European diseases like smallpox to the new world.
The result was horrific as many people have mentioned. But the circumstances leading up to the outbreak, and the world in which the outbreak occurred bear no resemblance to the global situation today.
The analogy is completely invalid. Simple as that.
We'd do more good calling for increased funding for community hospitals to help them keep extra beds on hand and to increase the number of nurses they can employ per patient. Stockpiling vaccines for a virus that doesn't exist is like collecting car keys in the hope you might have a spare one when you buy a new car in three years.
If only people flipped this much over AIDS or ethnic cleansing in Africa as they do over hypotheticals like this.