Pandemic flu virus
"Pandemic flu virus
By John M. Barry, Fortune, October 18, 2004
In 1918 a virus that normally infected birds exploded into the deadliest disease outbreak in human history. Symptoms of the so-called Spanish influenza were so violent that some victims broke ribs from coughing fits; others bled from the mouth, nose, ears, and eyes; still others turned such a dark blue that a physician confessed 'it is hard to distinguish the colored men from the white.' Half the dead were young adults. City after city ran out of coffins; many imitated Philadelphia's use of steam shovels to dig mass graves for bodies wrapped in winding sheets.
Experts now think that this worldwide epidemic, or pandemic, killed at least 40 million, and one Nobel laureate believed the death toll may have reached 100 million. Even taking the lower estimate and without adjusting for population growth (up by 250%), the virus killed more people in 24 weeks than AIDS has killed in 24 years.
This was the 1918 influenza pandemic. The flu we come down with today is tame by comparison. But the emergence of a new pandemic influenza virus is, as a recent National Academy of Science study claims, 'not only inevitable, but overdue.' And while medicine has advanced enormously in the past 86 years, it has no panacea against a powerful virus. "
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