I posted something about the Ebola crises yesterday quoting info from Wikipedia.
You want to open your eyes? Read Wikipedia’s article about the Spanish Influenza pandemic 1918 - 1920!
Being a history major I had ran across the term but never dug into it. That one article really opened my eyes. Particularly the part about it coming in two waves. Another thing that caught my attention was how authorities down played the scope of the pandemic to keep the population from panicking. Finally there was mention about the importance of securing your international borders. Japan escaped the worse of the Spanish Flu because it rapidly closed its borders and kept them closed.
And our Southern Border is how secure today?
Am I an alarmist there?
Well, what’s better a little over reaction or suffering “The global mortality rate from the 1918/1919 pandemic is not known, but an estimated 10% to 20% of those who were infected died. With about a third of the world population infected, this case-fatality ratio means 3% to 6% of the entire global population died.[30] Influenza may have killed as many as 25 million people in its first 25 weeks. Older estimates say it killed 40–50 million people,[4] while current estimates say 50–100 million people worldwide were killed.[31]” to quote Wikipedia.
Interesting you bring that up. There is a very old cemetery back in the mountains that I have occasion to see now and again. We always stop and walk around - it’s a beautiful and interesting place in a somber way. A lot of the deaths occurred in & around 1918, during the ‘Spanish Flu’ epidemic. That cemetery got me interested in the subject and I have done some reading up on it.
A lot of the Ebola spreading issues in Africa ARE hygiene, culture, lack of info .... a lot of it is fear, plain & simple. The CDC is playing things down, but if Ebola gets into certain populations .... foreign communities (speak little English), illegals, ‘ferals’, low info .... you have hygiene issues AND a lot of those folks want to avoid ‘authority’ & quarantine, would be more likely to hide bodies, etc. Similar behavior - not as bad, but enough for the virus to spread. There are NO meds to ‘cure’ it, only supportive treatment - death rate is running 50-70%. The two folks at Emory, receiving experimental drugs are the exception to the rule in a big way. And then there’s the media with all their hype and hoopla ... they’ll make the fear factor worse and the info they have is often conflicting, confusing & even downright inaccurate.
For all these reasons, I don’t think you’re being alarmist. I’m not sure what the solution is - say too much or too little, either option isn’t a good thing. I DO think the southern border should be locked down pronto but we know how President Obola feels about that - even without Ebola, drug-resistant TB is a major threat and it spreads easily, plus you likely could see a resurgence of polio which has been eliminated in this country, but not others. I remember standing in line with my folks at an elementary school to get the vaccine, but I know older people who had polio and then as adults, got the ‘relapse’ or whatever they call it - my folks were terrified of it. Now we’re hearing, in our state, illegal kids are going to be considered “homeless” which means they do not have to provide health & immunization records when they go to school in the fall. Of course, all the AMERICAN CITIZEN kids do .... and will be at risk from the illegals that don’t.
The government is not doing what they should to protect us and if we do get something like an Avian flu, even Ebola & it’s epidemic, they can’t handle it & I think we’re on our own.