Influenza

The "flu" has struck us here in NEPA... just in time for my benefits to run out at my former job. Nice.

Our youngest, who is almost 7, was up nearly all night with a fever of no less than 100.9 and as high as 103.3. He is terribly congested, has a tight, quiet cough, and cries constantly due to a bed headache. The poor baby is miserable, and it is unavoidable that the rest of us are as a result, too.

Between calls for more tissues and dry pajamas (he sweats rivers as his fever spikes and wanes), I was looking at possible treatments and ideas online, and you can't search FLU and not find the 1918 pandemic articles. It truly is staggering to look at those numbers of infection and mortality for the three years that the disease raged... but what is truly frightening is when you transpose those numbers into today's populations. THAT is scary.

The Spanish Flu pandemic killed 3% of the global population... more than 50 million people. Scary all by itself. What is really unbelievable, though, is that 500 million where infected. That is very nearly 1 out of every 3 of the 1.6 billion people on the planet at the time infected with the Flu... from Pole to Pole, and from Europe's largest cities to the smallest inhabited islands in the Pacific Ocean. Amazing.

Given today's populations, were the same disease to rage with the same rate of mortality (roughly 10% of those infected died), the death toll in the modern world would exceed 180 million souls. That would mean that more than 9 million Americans would be dead within one year of the pandemic... staggering.

Now, I'm not the "Chicken Little" type, and I'm not worried that what our little 7 has brought home from school is H1N1... but if it is Influenza A, which is the modern strain of Spanish Flu and the most common strain in the world, then it is an H1N1 virus and shares many features and risks as Swine Flu. It would seem, however, that if you or your ancestors survived the Spanish Flu pandemic, you have a built-in genetic weapon against ALL H1N1 strains... the body knows the virus and has the natural antiviral defenses ready to combat it. The healthier you are, the more likely you are to ride out the infection.

Still... look at the numbers and play the game. We are the descendants of the survivors of a pandemic that killed more people (although a smaller percentage of population overall) than the Black Death... and only by less than 100 years. We all are old enough to have KNOWN survivors of the Spanish Flu first-hand. That should tell you it wasn't that long ago... it wasn't that far away.