A while back I blogged about the Lex Anteinternet: The 1918-1919 Influenza Epidemic: I was reminded of that as the flu, the real deal, not some bad cold that people mistake for the flu, has really been going around recently. All sorts of people have it.
It's going through NCHS like there's no tomorrow. At least three members of the swim team have it, including my son. And its a nasty H1N1 variant.
H1N1 is bad, but it's not anything like the 1918 flu, which was a H5 variant. Be that as it may, things like this really demonstrate to me how vulnerable to the flu or something like it we are. I'll fly down to Denver today. So far, I haven't had the flu, and I haven't felt like I was getting it, although I'm coughing slightly this morning. I've clearly been exposed to the flu here at home. And at work where at least a couple of the people have had it recently. And I was at a meeting recently where a person was about two weeks out from it, no doubt over the flu, but still suffering from its effects.
My point is that the 1918 flu managed to go clean across the globe with no difficult, over about a two year time span. By that time, however, humans as a species would have had a little time for our own natures to begin to evolve where exposures had occurred, and we would have had some time to prepare where it had not immediately hit. World War One helped spread it around, but at that time it was still the case that transoceanic travel moved no faster than ships. That's certainly not the case now. A flu outbreak could be everywhere before we even knew it was an outbreak.
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