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Coughing Pig Death
29th April 2009
Cory Doctorow posted an excellent examination of the current darling amongst media doomsters over on Boing Boing about the actual math behind the Spanish Flu of 1918. It’s not my intention to minimize the grief that had to accompany the deaths of so many people (my grandfather’s 1st wife died in the epidemic). Modern medicine and instantaneous communication really does limit how likely it is that an epidemic of the severity of the Spanish Flu will happen again. Honestly, the Black Death is estimated to have killed a quarter of the population in Europe but that was during a time that medicine was little better than magic (we’ll set aside for a moment that it’s sometimes not much better than that now). They didn’t have anitbiotics or an understanding of germ theory or a grasp of how the disease was transmitted. It killed 25% of the population. In 1918, medicine was better but antibiotics weren’t available and it killed 2.5%.
Is it possible we could move along to the sensationalist photo-op, Big Media?
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