Right we have two *possible* pandemics (at least two) that *could* occur.  (See
aricle below for the other one).

Actually, the 1918 one (at least) affected young healthy people more than old
ones.   Bird flu also perhaps.  Sometihng about it's getting deep into the
lungs.

Also, at age 88, born before 1918, I believe that that entire group has been
found to still have antibodies to Spanish flu, which may give some immunity
also to bird flu.  No guarantees though.

People who die quickly from these flus are actually dying from overreaction of
their immune systems to the infection, which causes their lungs to fill with
gunk.   In older and less healthy people, the immune system does not overreact
as much and they have a better chance of surviving,

I am not sure on which siide of that divide sinus and asthma sufferors would
fall.  

Anyway, everyone please at least get regular flu shots anyway (open to everyone
in the U.S starting Monday and available in many supermarkets).

Get a Flumist *also* if you can.  There is some *suggestive* evidence that
taking both the dead and the live vaccines may help you later in the event of a
pandemic (even of a different strain).

=================

A Flu Hope, Or Horror?

By Charles Krauthammer

Friday, October 14, 2005; Page A19

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/13/AR2005101301783.html

While official Washington has been poring over Harriet Miers's long-ago doings
on the Dallas City Council and parsing the byzantine comings and goings of the
Patrick Fitzgerald grand jury, relatively unnoticed was perhaps the most
momentous event of our lifetime -- what is left of it, as I shall explain. It
was announced last week that U.S. scientists have just created a living,
killing copy of the 1918 "Spanish" flu.

This is big. Very big.
   
First, it is a scientific achievement of staggering proportions. The Spanish
flu has not been seen on this blue planet for 85 years. Its re-creation is a
story of enterprise, ingenuity, serendipity, hard work and sheer brilliance. It
involves finding deep in the bowels of a military hospital in Washington a
couple of tissue samples from the lungs of soldiers who died in 1918 -- in an
autopsy collection first ordered into existence by Abraham Lincoln -- and the
disinterment of an Alaskan Eskimo who died of the flu and whose remains had
been preserved by the permafrost. Then, using slicing and dicing techniques
only Michael Crichton could imagine, they pulled off a microbiological Jurassic
Park: the first-ever resurrection of an ancient pathogen. And not just any
ancient pathogen, explained virologist Eddie Holmes, but "the agent of the most
important disease pandemic in human history."

Which brings us to the second element of this story: Beyond the brilliance lies
the sheer terror. We have brought back to life an agent of near-biblical
destruction. It killed more people in six months than were killed in the four
years of World War I. It killed more humans than any other disease of similar
duration in the history of the world, says Alfred W. Crosby, who wrote a
history of the 1918 pandemic. And, notes New Scientist magazine, when the
re-created virus was given to mice in heavily quarantined laboratories in
Atlanta, it killed the mice more quickly than any other flu virus ever tested .

Now that I have your attention, consider, with appropriate trepidation, the
third element of this story: What to do with this knowledge? Not only has the
virus been physically re-created, but its entire genome has also now been
published for the whole world, good people and very bad, to see.

The decision to publish was a very close call, terrifyingly close.

On the one hand, we need the knowledge disseminated. We've learned from this
research that the 1918 flu was bird flu, "the most bird-like of all mammalian
flu viruses," says Jeffery Taubenberger, lead researcher in unraveling the
genome. There is a bird flu epidemic right now in Asia that has infected 117
people and killed 60. It has already developed a few of the genomic changes
that permit transmission to humans. Therefore, you want to put out the
knowledge of the structure of the 1918 flu, which made the full jump from birds
to humans, so that every researcher in the world can immediately start looking
for ways to anticipate, monitor, prevent and counteract similar changes in
today's bird flu.

We are essentially in a life-or-death race with the bird flu. Can we figure out
how to preempt it before it figures out how to evolve into a transmittable form
with 1918 lethality that will decimate humanity? To run that race we need the
genetic sequence universally known -- not just to inform and guide but to
galvanize new research.

On the other hand, resurrection of the virus and publication of its structure
open the gates of hell. Anybody, bad guys included, can now create it.
Biological knowledge is far easier to acquire for Osama bin Laden and friends
than nuclear knowledge. And if you can't make this stuff yourself, you can
simply order up DNA sequences from commercial laboratories around the world
that will make it and ship it to you on demand. Taubenberger himself admits
that "the technology is available."

And if the bad guys can't make the flu themselves, they could try to steal it.
That's not easy. But the incentive to do so from a secure facility could not be
greater. Nature, which published the full genome sequence, cites Rutgers
bacteriologist Richard Ebright as warning that there is a significant risk
"verging on inevitability" of accidental release into the human population or
of theft by a "disgruntled, disturbed or extremist laboratory employee."

Why try to steal loose nukes in Russia? A nuke can only destroy a city. The flu
virus, properly evolved, is potentially a destroyer of civilizations.

We might have just given it to our enemies.

Have a nice day.