Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
1920. Unlike the typical influenza outbreak, where it is primarily the elderly, infirm, and young
children who perish, the bulk of the Spanish Flu victims were previously healthy young adults.
However, there was a big difference between the way the world of 1918 functioned and the
way the world works today. Most people would assume that today's world is far better
equipped to handle a major pandemic than we were almost a hundred years ago, but that as-
sumption is dead wrong. We are certainly more capable of rapidly diagnosing, isolating, and
treating infectious diseases, but modern air travel practically guarantees that once a virulent
drug-resistant strain of a deadly virus or bacteria has spread beyond a few small villages, it has
burst the boundaries of easy containment and will rapidly spread around the world. When the
1918 Spanish flu struck, over half the population of the United States lived in rural areas and
roughly 30 percent of the workforce was employed on farms. In those days, if trucks stopped
making deliveries, you could simply walk over the hill to a local farm to buy items of food. In
those days, people made and grew most things by hand. Nowadays, if gasoline stops flowing,
and the electricity is shut off for extended periods because everyone left work to tend for the
sick (or to keep from getting sick), the big machine of global commerce would screech to a
halt!
Take the case of the swine flu pandemic of 2009—once it started to spread, there was no
stopping it. Luckily, it turned out that this flu was no more deadly than your average winter's
strain of influenza, but it was certainly quite virulent, infecting a large part of the world's popu-
lation in a single year. If that flu had turned out to be as deadly as some people feared, we
would have suffered a global meltdown like we have never seen in the modern world—totally
crashing the systems that keep our food, water, and medicine flowing freely. We dodged that
bullet, but with bacteria developing antibiotic resistance faster than we can develop new medi-
cines, and viruses' ability to “gene swap” genetic material between deadly diseases with low
infection rates (such as avian flu, which has a 50 percent fatality rate but is rarely transmitted
between humans) and highly infectious diseases, like common human flu viruses, it is only a
matter of time before the roulette wheel of natural genetic selection and mutation deals human-
ity a crippling blow.
When it comes to battling serious antibiotic-resistant bacteria and viruses, the news is not
all bad. The good news is that there are a number of alternative medicines, procedures, and
herbs that can be quite effective against antibiotic-resistant superbugs and deadly viruses. The
bad news is that there is no money to be made on these alternative remedies, and since it takes
many millions of dollars to run a drug or remedy through the Food and Drug Administration
