Quotes About Influenza

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

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.

Influenza. Remember, Elizabeth, I had it back in the spring? A lot of other people did, too. It wasn't too bad, although I do hate to be sick, but it's back now, with a vengeance.

Influenza is a serious disease. Kids die of influenza, both in Japan and the United States, and if you give a drug to people who are at risk of dying, there will be people who die who got the drug,... There is no signal the drug is doing it as opposed to the disease.

This emotion I'm feeling now, this is love, right? I don't know. Is it a longing? Is it a giddy stupid happiness just because you're with me? Yes, she said. That's influenza, said Miro. Watch for nausea or diarrhea within a few hours.

The flu is very unpredictable when it begins and in how it takes off.

All countries should immediately now activate their pandemic preparedness plans. Countries should remain on high alert for unusual outbreaks of influenza-like illness and severe pneumonia.

There is no bird flu in commercial stocks.

In nature, disease-causing strains of avian influenza rarely spread far because the birds sicken and die before they can fly to spread it to others.

More than 50 million people around the world died during the 1918-1919 flu pandemic. That's why we have epidemiologists all over the world tracking whether new strains of flu emerge.

Vaccination is the single most important step people can take to protect themselves from influenza.

We continue to recommend flu vaccine as the single best way to protect yourself against the flu. The vaccine will protect against strains covered in the vaccine, and it may have some effectiveness in the drifted strains.

The greatest single epidemic in human history was the one of influenza that killed 21 million people at the end of the First World War.

My Dad died during the flu epidemic in 1918 when I was 4 years old. He left a lot of classical recordings behind that I began listening to at an early age, so he must have been a music lover.

You might be asking too much if you're looking for one vaccine for every conceivable influenza. If you have one or two that cover the vast majority of isolates, I wouldn't be ashamed to call that a 'universal vaccine.'

One way in which grief gets hidden is that death now occurs largely offstage. In the earlier tradition from which Mrs. Post wrote, the act of dying had not yet been professionalized. It did not typically involve hospitals. Women died in childbirth. Children died of fevers. Cancer was untreatable. At the time she undertook her book of etiquette, there would have been few American households untouched by the influenza pandemic of 1918. Death was up close, at home.

The year after I was born," I said, "there was a great epidemic of influenza. All over the world. People died in hundreds and thousands; whole villages disappeared in the space of a week. And then came the other, my war.

With 30,000 deaths and 200,000 hospitalizations from the seasonal flu, those numbers are certainly higher than what we've seen of the swine flu. Protecting yourself from both viruses is very important.

We know there are certain types of viruses that are nasty - influenza, for instance, is an area that is not a blindside. But a lot of viruses have come out of nowhere, like H.I.V., or to a certain extent SARS. Because we know we have the potential to be blindsided, we really have to investigate the unknowns.

Newspapers reported on the disease with the same mixture of truth and half-truth, truth and distortion, truth and lies with which they reported everything else. And no national official ever publicly acknowledged the danger of influenza.

The elderly, normally the group most susceptible to influenza, not only survived attacks of the disease but were attacked far less often. This resistance of the elderly was a worldwide phenomenon. The most likely explanation is that an earlier pandemic , so mild as to not attract attention, resembled the 1918 virus closely enough that it provided protection. (p. 408 paperback edition)

H1N1 virus of 1918, the virus that created its own killing fields.

Influenza is a viral disease. When it kills, it usually does so in one of two ways: either quickly and directly with a violent viral pneumonia so damaging that it has been compared to burning the lungs; or more slowly and indirectly by stripping the body of defenses, allowing bacteria to invade the lungs and cause a more common and slower-killing bacterial pneumonia.