I agree that this is a much more serious threat than most people realize. The U.S. is not even doing as much as other less wealthy countries to prepare for this catastrophe.
I believe the vaccine, which is supposedly very effective, requires somewhere between 6 - 12 shots. And it takes months to cultivate the vaccine. Unfortunately we outsource our flu vaccine production to other countries, most notably the U.K. That's why we had a shortage last year of regular flu vaccine when one of the U.K. facilities was shut down due to contamination.
As you probably know, since you started this thread, the 1918 so-called Spanish Influenza was an avian virus. This was only recently determined after testing lung tissue samples from an exhumed corpse in Alaska's permafrost region and tissue samples preserved by the military from World War I. What makes an avian virus so deadly, once it mutates to enable human to human transmission, is that we have no built up immunity to it. Right now I believe all of the reported cases involve bird to human infection. The CDC expects this virus to attain human to human transmission sometime within the next year, possibly within the next few months.
I am very familiar with the 1918 flu pandemic because both of my maternal grandparents died within 12 hours of each other from it. Both were in their early 30's and both died within a week after coming down with symptoms. Your lungs fill with fluid and you essentially drown. It is difficult to say exactly how many people died during that pandemic but the low estimate is 25 million. That estimate does not include China, India or any of the other developing countries that did not keep statistics. Including those countries would bring the minimum estimate up to 50 million. Some experts place the high end estimate at 100 million.
It's impossible to predict how many people might die in a new avian flu pandemic. There are so many factors that are different today. For one thing, we have probably four or five times as many people living on the planet now and we are in much closer contact thanks to air travel, etc. The big unknown is whether governments will be able to meet this challenge effectively with a vaccine and other measures. If you use FEMA's effectiveness at handling hurricanes as your guideline to the effectiveness of government programs, you might decide to lock yourself in your house and not come out until next spring.
If the virus jumps to human to human transmission before we (meaning the world community) are prepared, total losses could run anywhere from 100 million to 300 million.



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