Prepping for La Grippe

What a strange and disturbing journey this whole ebola research project has proved to be.

As one CDCer said of ebola: “It’s a gruesome and merciless diseases” but if put in its historical context ebola is weak.

But the medical details of the disease are not what I am talking about. What freaks me out how there woefully underprepared we are as a global society for epidemiological outbreaks. When it comes to global health defense systems, there is no there there.

A major take away may well be that those preppers types are on to something, sadly they underestimate the scale of the problem, as illustrated in Preparing for the Coming Influenza Pandemic, written by a doctor. If you want to read more about the big flu:

• The Influenza Pandemic of 1918, Stanford has a good page which includes “Graphs of the Influenza Epidemic Impact.”
• A flutracker page also has The Grim Reaper by Louis Raemaekers and scanned charts from Kansas 1918
• It All Started in Kansas by David Brownm an article from Washington Post Weekly Edition Vol. 9, Num. 21, March 23-30, 1992
• Squirrel Nut Zippers - La Grippe