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You remember the 2009 swine flu epidemic, right? It was a mix of swine, bird and human flu viruses that got together and made a lot of people very, very sick. It seems to have been forgotten and that part about how genuinely concerned people were has never been brought up as a comparison to Today\u2019s Vicious Bug stuff. It was 2009: you remember that year, right?<\/p>\n
The Big Scare in the UK back then was BSE (Bovine spongiform encephalitis), which was a lethal disease that used deer and cattle as its hosts, and caused a serious lot of damage over there.\u00a0 We had it here in the USA, too, but nothing like that.\u00a0 https:\/\/www.cdc.gov\/prions\/bse\/index.html<\/a> Eventually, it cleared up after wrecking the British dairy industry and didn’t do much of anything over here.\u00a0 No, we were more concerned about the hog + bird flu that was “guaranteed to destroy civilization”, or something like that, if you paid attention to the news reporters.<\/p>\n https:\/\/www.sciencedaily.com\/releases\/2016\/06\/160627160935.htm<\/a><\/p>\n Now, who was president then? It wasn\u2019t biteme. It was someone else entirely. So lots of people got sick with that flu bug, lots of people got their flu shots at work (like me) to prevent getting it from those contaminated sneezers on the bus and train, or they went to their doctor or a local clinic, and mostly, we just went on with our jobs and lives.<\/p>\n But none of that compares with the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, which was brought to the USA by soldiers returning from the battlefield at the end of World War I. There were no remedies like flu vaccines back then.<\/p>\n \u201cThe only other H1N1 pandemic flu known to date was the “Spanish” flu of 1918 that killed between 50 and 100 million people — 3 to 5 percent of the world’s population.\u201d \u2013 article<\/p>\n The CDC, on the 100th<\/sup> anniversary of the Spanish Flu pandemic, ran an article on how and where it originated (in Spain, with 30,000 Chinese workers who had come there looking for work) and it was an H1N1 avian flu virus. Where do you get bird viruses? At poultry farms, among other places, especially if they are overcrowded and not very clean. Think about that for a moment. And let’s do remember that, while viruses are not generally considered to be “alive” the way bacteria are, they are still clever enough to find a way to mutate and occupy a potential host. And they are harder to kill off than bacteria, because they don’t respond to antibacterial medications because they are viruses! Clever fellows!<\/p>\n When the 2009 swine flu began to rise in human numbers, the CDC went to their storage files and found tissue samples on slides taken from patients (mostly returning soldiers) who had died of complications related to the Spanish flu. Remember, that was 1918, and there were no vaccines for something like that 100 years ago. And that flu was the H1N1 avian flu, with an overall death count in the USA of about 2,000,000 people when it was done spreading, at the end of its two-year \u201creign\u201d.<\/p>\n