It’s likely beyond containment now, but to describe the Mexican swine flu outbreak as a potential re-run of the Spanish influenza pandemic seems, subject to change without notice, wildly alarmist.
The 1918 influenza pandemic claimed 50,000 of Canada’s eight million citizens, almost as many casualties as the First World War, while statistically shortening the average lifespan by 10 years. One doctor observed at the time that some patients “died struggling to clear their airways of a blood-tinged froth that sometimes gushed from their nose and mouth.” Yuck.
That virus hit with astonishing speed in an age before vaccines were mass produced. One newspaper reported that four women had been happily playing bridge late into the night. By the next morning, three were dead.
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