Posted on 04/25/2003 12:39:32 AM PDT by bruinbirdman
Not too long ago, the Far Eastern Economic Review made this prediction:
The world's next flu pandemic will probably originate in southern China, then transit through Hong Kong and on to the world. How ready are we?
It comes from a report, written in the wake of an outbreak of killer avian flu, from our issue of June 7, 2001, which opens:
THE FEAR IS THAT when Hong Kong sneezes, the world catches the flu. The world's leading influenza experts are virtually unanimous in their suspicion that Hong Kong will be close to the epicentre of the next pandemic of a contagion that swept the globe three times last century, most lethally in 1918-19 when a particularly vicious flu virus claimed up to 40 million lives.
Articles in our archive record similar outbreaks of disease centred on southern China. This extract is from a report published in October, 1968:
Declining standards of public health seem to have been one of the more serious costs of the Cultural Revolution. Some specialists suggest that the Asian flu which whipped through Hongkong on its way to Japan, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand last summer began in China -- and they may be right. The upheavals of the Cultural Revolution must have weakened China's collective resistance to mass epidemics. Urban services have been paralysed, rubbish has been left to pile up in the streets and nightsoil collections have been suspended. Meeting rooms, packed late into the night with fatigued youngsters, scores of mass rallies and far-flung migrations of students have all helped to spread communicable disease. Although the Chinese press has never discussed it, Taiwan has claimed that cerebral and spinal meningitis has weakened large sections of the population. An Australian student who visited China early this year saw notices on a Peking general hospital notice board list ing precautionary measures to be taken against type B meningitis.
Happy time travelling.
Why do you think health officials are making such a stink about a few flu patients? They are not calling it like it is. Wouldn't want to hurt the feelings of a few Commies.
yitbos
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