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Good luck getting an appointment with a doctor or seen at a clinic when millions are sick. Medications, hospital beds and sterile saline solution are going to run out.
There may be no world war right now, but there are plenty of battles being fought.
I have never heard that the world was within a week or two of meltdown in 1918. Perhaps you'd like to share some links?
I'm not sure where you're getting this loss of power from. Health care is much, much better now than it was in 1918, which was 97 years ago. We have anti-virals. They don't work like antibiotics, to kill the virus, but they do stop the virus from replicating and shorten the course of the disease (and the length of infectivity). They can also be given prophylactically, to contacts of flu patients. We've picked up a little knowledge about how to treat influenza in the past 97 years. We also know a little more about how to at least slow the rate of transmission. We're not at war, either.
The world coming within a week or two of complete meltdown in 1918- loss of power, water, etc. due to no one working is clearly presented in the winner of the 2005 Keck Award from the National Academies of Science for the year's outstanding book on science or medicine- The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History.
You might want to give the book a read, and see what actually happened.
You should watch the news today, if you think we are not at war. The Patriot Act is still in effect. We hear every day that "The War on Terror" is still in full swing. We have 19 active aircraft carriers, and by far the most active and powerful armed forces on the globe-with troops active and moving all over the earth. We are killing people in other countries with drones. Soldiers from all around the United States arrive to stay in barracks with soldiers from everywhere, mixing together, and there is much more traveling about by everyone- not just soldiers- than there was in 1917.
Today, we can create a new vaccine for an existing strain of flu that we already have on hand in 4 to 6 months- given a regular, stable situation, with no doctors and technicians dropping like flies and the power on. From that point, it would still take a long, long time to create enough to vaccinate the globe.
The 1917-18 flu did the worst of it's damage in the span of a month.
We have nothing whatsoever on hand that would stop or slow a newly mutated, unknown virus that kills quickly and spreads fast. Nothing. Hospitals would be overwhelmed in short order, like in 1918.
You haven't mentioned anything that we could do to stop that from happening.
People, of course, would panic. Try to imagine someone in every family you know getting sick and dying within a week of one another in a quite horrible fashion, and people who tended them also getting sick. How much of this would it take for you to lock yourself in your house with some groceries and not go out?
It's not hard to grasp this. It's what happened then, and it's what would happen again. If it didn't burn itself out quickly- and no one is at the water treatment plant, or power generation plant because they are home dying, or their husband or child is dying.....
...well, you should be able to figure out what happens to the lights.
The world coming within a week or two of complete meltdown in 1918- loss of power, water, etc. due to no one working is clearly presented in the winner of the 2005 Keck Award from the National Academies of Science for the year's outstanding book on science or medicine- The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History.
You might want to give the book a read, and see what actually happened.
Perhaps I will.
You should watch the news today, if you think we are not at war. The Patriot Act is still in effect. We hear every day that "The War on Terror" is still in full swing. We have 19 active aircraft carriers, and by far the most active and powerful armed forces on the globe-with troops active and moving all over the earth. We are killing people in other countries with drones. Soldiers from all around the United States arrive to stay in barracks with soldiers from everywhere, mixing together, and there is much more traveling about by everyone- not just soldiers- than there was in 1917.
Well, I wrote that before the Paris attacks.
Today, we can create a new vaccine for an existing strain of flu that we already have on hand in 4 to 6 months- given a regular, stable situation, with no doctors and technicians dropping like flies and the power on. From that point, it would still take a long, long time to create enough to vaccinate the globe.
The 1917-18 flu did the worst of it's damage in the span of a month.
We have nothing whatsoever on hand that would stop or slow a newly mutated, unknown virus that kills quickly and spreads fast. Nothing. Hospitals would be overwhelmed in short order, like in 1918.
You haven't mentioned anything that we could do to stop that from happening.
From the link: "Unlike today, there were no effective vaccines or antivirals (which I did mention), drugs that treat the flu."
These days, we have both. As I said, antivirals can also be given prophylactically, to contacts of people with flu. We also have antibiotics to treat secondary infections, e.g. pneumonia. We have far better health care knowledge and facilities. It might be bad, but it wouldn't be 1918 redux. Yes, it would take a few months to get a vaccine going, but you'd be surprised how quickly we could get people vaccinated once the vaccine became available.
People, of course, would panic. Try to imagine someone in every family you know getting sick and dying within a week of one another in a quite horrible fashion, and people who tended them also getting sick. How much of this would it take for you to lock yourself in your house with some groceries and not go out?
Exaggerate much?
It's not hard to grasp this. It's what happened then, and it's what would happen again. If it didn't burn itself out quickly- and no one is at the water treatment plant, or power generation plant because they are home dying, or their husband or child is dying.....
...well, you should be able to figure out what happens to the lights.
Thing is, most people didn't have treated water or electricity then, either.
You would see scavenged solar, then small refinery operations, followed by oil production, reopening of small electric plants. I live near a dam. It doesn't take a lot to make it work and we'd have regional power back on PDQ.
The thing would be how to divvy up the left over stuff and property. Probably war lords would arise and grab as much territory as they could hold, backed with abandoned armor and military weaponry.
The big problems would be having like 130 nuclear power plants melting down through lack of attention and lack of knowledge. Can you see some moron figure out how to lift the rods into a position where they could make an unrestrained reaction, and then leave them - ka-boom, there goes like three states!
On the nuclear end of this, you are way off base. There is just no damn way to make a reactor explode like a fission bomb. Not sure why one needs to assume the plant operators would abandon it. I have worked at nuclear power plants, certainly given one that could operate as an "island" electrically without the rest of the grid - not sure why the crews would not keep it operating at least as long as installed fuel held out - up to about 18 months at full power, could be for example 180 months at 10% power.
Assuming the operators at least kept things cooled for about 6 months after initial shutdown, the plant could be safely abandoned - well with reasonable safety anyway. But it begs the question, why would an organized work force with their own civilization, really including a good security force, pitch all that and live like cave people?
As to the dam, yeah, a few people can operate it, but eventually maintenance needs doing - that takes more people and is a lot easier if power is available from other parts of the hydro plant if not a full grid.
You know...we really don't need to worry about plagues and communicable diseases. There has been nothing since the mid-20th century to compare with the death rate from "lifestyle" diseases. People drop like flies from heart disease, diabetes, strokes, cancer. And yet, we all refuse to change our lifestyles. We whine and moan about "health care" to cure and/or manage these diseases, never understanding that we can avoid them ourselves for free. But collectively, we just won't. Ahhhh...the soft life!
2. There is no more an immediate cure for a new strain of flu like the one that popped up in 1917, than there was In 1917. People who state otherwise, that we carry resistances to "new" viral shifts don't have a clue as to what they are talking about.
The 1917-18 era flu killed mostly people in their 20s and 30s not because older people had been already exposed to a similar virus. The younger people died because their own immune systems were stronger than those of the older population. This caused younger persons immune systems to produce huge amounts of antibodies to attack the invading virus- which settled in the lungs. The lungs were destroyed in the huge battle between the super healthy younger people's antibodies, and the virus. Basically, people's youth worked against them. Older people tended to get sick, but often recovered, because their lungs weren't destroyed.
Older people just didn't get sick from the Spanish flu because they had caught the Russian flu in 1889. The flu normally kills the very young and the very old. The Spanish flu was hard on the young, but the elderly just didn't get sick because they were already immune. If you were over 40 in 1917, you were pretty safe.
Older people just didn't get sick from the Spanish flu because they had caught the Russian flu in 1889. The flu normally kills the very young and the very old. The Spanish flu was hard on the young, but the elderly just didn't get sick because they were already immune. If you were over 40 in 1917, you were pretty safe.
Very few people understand that the flu virus undergoes an antigen shift- which changed it to something new, combining two different virus, whenever it rears up and becomes deadly. It isn't the same bug from infection to infection, which is why it is so dangerous. A human infected with a known virus and a bird/swine virus come together through contact, and an antigen shift occurs when they meet- creating a whole new virus which can sometimes be deadly to humans. It changes to become unrecognizable to the bodies immunity. The reason we can't vaccinate against future strains is because they don't exist yet, so your premise is flawed about the Russian flu being the same flu as the Spanish flu.
If it were that easy, we could simply go into our stocks of virus and vaccinate everyone from every strain we have, using the 1917 virus, and everyone would be protected against all future virus forevermore.
It does not work that way.
Older people did catch the 1917-18 virus too- but the older population's weaker immune system caused them to survive the disease because their lungs weren't destroyed by their own immune systems burning their lung tissue out.
People like President Wilson caught and survived the flu, because they were old. Younger persons with weak immune systems also caught the disease and survived, which puzzled science at that time. The stronger your immune system, the more likely it would kill you, if you caught it.
This is an unusual thing to happen with a new virus- and it's the reason that the 1917-18 version was so very deadly.
I encourage everyone interested to read up on antigen shift here and get rid of the misconceptions we have. Virus are strange beasties- not even really "alive" in the sense that bacteria, animals and people are.
I think virus is probably the largest danger to man, (except for man himself), and that understanding how virus operate is an important thing.
It's interesting that the 1917-18 flu covered the entire globe- killing the most in the most out of the way, or the most crowded places. The only communities that escaped were a couple of small islands, and a few towns that barricaded themselves off from the world like some kind of zombie apocalypse scenario.
The virus did do the bulk of it's damage in just a few weeks. A milder version popped up the flu season before before the deadlier version and quickly burned out here in the states, and then, the horrible, super deadly version popped up in tightly packed army camps where people from different parts of the country came together.
I know a fair amount about it because it killed my great grandmother, and I heard enough stories from the family to buy what few books there are on the subject.
It apparently was the most horrible event of the 20th century. It was so awful most people wiped it from the minds, refused to talk about it or write about it afterwards. While the killing of WWI and WWII is well documented, the Spanish Flu nearly disappeared from the collective memory of the planet.
And really, it's just a question of when something akin to the experience will happen again.
Like our politicians and social interests? Mental care 'reality checkers' & life wreckers? lol
Some of the medical care here is coming up with false positives and dirty test results (any lab or radiology) timed as retaliation for your involvement in community/wrong relationships.
Seen too much about local Drs and some who are psychopaths in their personal lives....Have to use the medical sparingly and some people eventually were told to only have injuries treated & just live healthy....
Female Drs have shown concern for opportunistic treatment of some 'breast cancers' and other aliments that just clear up on their own...Male Dr response was "people who don't treat that when found early DIE". Females are taken through a ton of annual tests that serve no purpose and denied contraceptives if they cannot pay for all the 'testing' that has no purpose...
Even in the case of a designer virus that had a lengthy incubation period of several weeks to maximize the spread, it wouldn't affect more than 20% of the population.
You don't consider the loss of more than 1 billion humans to be devastating?
Just a matter of time before there is a mass extinction; super bug, volcano, meteor strike... Could be tomorrow or might be thousands of years from now. My money is on the super bug, technology is not the savior but the Achilles heal because it can allow it to spread far wide in less than a day. An airborne mutation of Ebola for example would spread rapidly, would be unstoppable and probably kill off a huge percentage of the population.
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