boltonblue

100 years ago We were gripped in the fight against he Spanish flu.
At nearby Fort Devens a hundred soldiers a day were dying.
across the US, folks in cities were dying by the thousands.
Whole families virtually disappeared overnight.
Healthy, young, robust, dock workers would develop a cough and then a fever and be dead by the next nightfall.
Eventually the you either died or survived and developed immunity and the flu ran out of victims.
And the flu stopped. But as many as 100 million worldwide had succumbed.

s2000Junky

Morris

Was that a typo or did you mean it? 1000 million is a billion.

boltonblue

fixed

dwb993

This is likely the least known epidemic in the country's history, even though it occurred not too long ago. There are people still alive today that remember playing on the stacked caskets in the streets. As mentioned, this particular strain attacked the folks we are told are least likely to succumb to the flu (normally it kills the very young or very old). I recall seeing one account of a woman living in a sorority house who called for assistance from medical services. By the time they responded to her location, she and all of her sorority sisters were dead. Truly horrific. It was a global event -- scientists disinterred a flu victim who had been buried above the Arctic Circle in an attempt to recover samples of the virus (and it's DNA) for further study.

If it happened then, it can happen now.