Quotes from Gina Kolata

But as the program got going, the smallest details became issues, even the very name of the disease. Pig farmers complained to the Centers for Disease Control that the name "swine flu" might frighten people away from eating pork. They asked, to no avail, that the flu's name be changed to "New Jersey

The 1918 epidemic came in two waves, a mild flu in the spring of 1918 followed by the killer flu in the fall.

The 1918 epidemic came in two waves, a mild flu in the spring of 1918 followed by the killer flu in the fall. And it seemed that the two flu strains were closely related. Infection with the first strain protected against the second

But the flu was expunged from newspapers, magazines, textbooks, and society's collective memory. Crosby calls the 1918 flu "America's forgotten pandemic," noting:

The cholera epidemic was a turning point marking the last time the disease would rage without simple precautions of public health.

How lethal was it? It was twenty-five times more deadly than ordinary influenzas. This flu killed 2.5 percent of its victims. Normally, just one-tenth of 1 percent of people who get the flu die. And since a fifth of the world's population got the flu that year, including 28 percent of Americans, the number of deaths was stunning.

Then the influenza epidemic arrived. Unlike the plague of Athens, unlike the Black Death, unlike even the cholera epidemic that felled William Sproat and the other cholera epidemics to come in that century, the flu epidemic had no chronicler.

But in the rest of the world, the illness came to be called the Spanish flu, to Spain's consternation. After all, the other countries of Europe, as well as the United States and countries in Asia, were hit too in that spring of 1918. Maybe the name stuck because Spain, still unaligned, did not censor its news reports, unlike other European countries. And so Spain's flu was no secret, unlike the flu elsewhere.

The results were unequivocal. Both in London and in the United States, people who had survived the 1918 flu had antibodies that completely blocked Shope's swine flu virus. People who were born after 1918 did not have those antibodies.

Giovanni Boccaccio wrote in his Decameron that people, afraid of contamination by the rotting corpses, would drag the dead outside their houses and leave them in front of their doors to be picked up, like so much garbage.

air cannot flow out of the room, only in. There they are bathed in blue ultraviolet light, which kills viruses. After that, they tug on

By the dawn of the twentieth century, for the first time since cities had come into existence 5,000 years before, infectious diseases were staunched to such an extent that cities were able to remain stable, and even grow, without depending on a constant stream of migrants from the countryside. It was a remarkable change.

knows exactly how serious this threat could be. Nevertheless, we cannot afford to take a chance with the health of our nation." With that preamble, Ford announced that he was asking Congress to appropriate $135 million "for the production of sufficient vaccine to inoculate every man, woman, and child in the United States," for a disease that no one could even prove to exist.

Pig farmers complained to the Centers for Disease Control that the name "swine flu" might frighten people away from eating pork. They asked, to no avail, that the flu's name be changed to "New Jersey flu.

city did take a few precautions. On September 18, its health officials began a public campaign against coughing, spitting, and sneezing. Three days later, the city

Instead, the dean had said, "Take a look at the person sitting to your left and to your right. Chances are that person will not be there four years from now." Every

He estimates the number of deaths worldwide as 100 million, a larger number than the conventional estimate of 20 to 40 million. But, he said, 20 million people died in India alone, making it impossible for the 20 to 40 million figure to be correct.

Perhaps, in some innocent encounter in China between a child and a bird, a new killer flu is on its way. Or perhaps, even now, a young man or a young woman has become infected with two different strains of flu viruses. They are mixing together in the person's lungs, their genes reassorting. Emerging from that witches' brew is a new virus, a chimera, that, like the 1918 flu virus, is perfectly suited for destruction.