Dave Pollard has some very scary predictions for the future as far as population control on his blog. It got me to thinking about what would happen if that many people were living in the U.S. in particular and in the world in general. It would certainly be a safe bet that a possible repercussion of this runaway population growth would be a massive disease outbreak. Probably something as simple as the flu.
According to many experts, we are overdue for a massive flu outbreak. SARS was not quite a pandemic, at least not here. The last pandemic here was in 1918, when something nicknamed "Spanish influenza" rampaged through communities. There were three "waves" of the disease. The first wave incubated in a military barracks among soldiers. The second wave in the fall was the deadliest, affecting both soldiers returning home and civilians. During this wave, over a million people across the world were infected, and hundreds of thousands died. The odd thing about this flu was that it affected mostly the young. Young adults between the ages of 18 and 40 were the hardest hit by the so-called "Spanish Lady." (In most epidemics, it's children and the elderly who usually get sick and often die.)
This flu season has already proven deadly in Colorado this year. Doctors are recommending that kids get shots. The government has bought the remaining stock to dole out, and companies are trying to crank out more. That's really all we've heard. Is it a new virus or something that's been floating around awhile? And what would happen, say, if SARS mutated and managed to migrate back to America? We do have some stricter standards because of 1918, but the swath of death it could cause is truly frightening.
9:45:34 PM 
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