Neil Sinhababu and Nicholas Beaudrot's political blog
Monday, April 27, 2009
Deep Thought
Does anyone remember when Hantavirus was going to kill us all?
2 comments:
MikeJ
said...
I remember that hantavirus is a nasty disease, but since it isn't transmitted from person to person I don't remember a threat of a plague. Of course I lived on the east coast when the panic over it was the biggest.
I also remember reading that the spanish flu epidemic during the Great War killed up to 5% of the people on earth.
2 comments:
I remember that hantavirus is a nasty disease, but since it isn't transmitted from person to person I don't remember a threat of a plague. Of course I lived on the east coast when the panic over it was the biggest.
I also remember reading that the spanish flu epidemic during the Great War killed up to 5% of the people on earth.
No, the 1918 pandemic killed somewhere between 50-100 million total, at most 1% of the world population at the time.
About 17 million did die in India, about 5% of its population.
That's still a lot of deaths, though.
And even a relatively modest flu pandemic, the 1968 Hong Kong flu, killed about a million.
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