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To: unseen

How? If the bug is in the geese, it is already here.

With the massive concentrations of people in shelters due to the hurricanes, we have a heck of a petri dish set up. Just think what will happen when all those folks in the domes stat getting the flu, even regular flu.

Some theories say the reason the 1918 pandemic took off was all the military forts set up for WWI. With all this hurricane evacuees, we have a similar situation only in a smaller scale.


190 posted on 09/21/2005 5:12:38 AM PDT by redgolum ("God is dead" -- Nietzsche. "Nietzsche is dead" -- God.)
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To: redgolum
"Some theories say the reason the 1918 pandemic took off was all the military forts set up for WWI. With all this hurricane evacuees, we have a similar situation only in a smaller scale."

Very good point.

The 'Spanish' influenza may, however, have originated in March 1918 among U.S. soldiers in Kansas; about 500 men there were infected, among whom 48 were listed as having died of "pneumonia".

Those who survived the illness may have carried the disease to Europe, where in the summer and fall of 1918 over one and one-half million U.S. soldiers were sent to fight in World War One.

On September 28th, 1918 a "4th Liberty Loan Drive" parade in Philadelphia was attended by 200,000 people. Since influenza is a respiratory illness spread by breathing, within days of the parade 635 new cases of influenza were reported; and on 6 October, 289 people died.

In the midst of the epidemic the acting Surgeon General of the Army noted the unusual character of this epidemic: whereas influenza normally was a mild disease that killed only the very young and the very old, this influenza was most dangerous to people 21 to 29 years of age. This influenza took the strong and spared the weak.

Source

191 posted on 09/21/2005 6:22:17 AM PDT by M. Espinola (Freedom is never free)
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