The last great swine flu epidemic

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 10:59:00 +0000

There is evidence there will be a major flu epidemic this coming fall. The indication is that we will see a return of the 1918 flu virus that is the most virulent form of the flu. In 1918 a half million Americans died. The projections are that this virus will kill one million Americans in 1976.

-- F. David Matthews, secretary of health, education, and welfare (Feb., 1976)

In January 1976, 19-year old U.S. Army Private David Lewis, stationed at Fort Dix, joined his platoon on a 50-mile hike through the New Jersey snow. Lewis didn't have to go; he was suffering from flu and had been confined to his quarters by his unit's medical officer. Thirteen miles into the hike, Lewis collapsed and died a short time later of pneumonia caused by influenza. Because Lewis was young, generally healthy and should not have succumbed to the common flu, his death set off a cascade of uncertainty that confused the scientists, panicked the government and eventually embittered a public made distrustful of authority by Vietnam and Watergate.

This past Sunday, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano left open the possibility of a mass immunization program for the current outbreak of swine flu. If that happens, the Obama administration has a lot to learn from the debacle set in motion by Private Lewis' ill-fated hike.

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Wed, 05 Feb 2003 20:30:00 +0000

A little more than a year ago, I stood with about two dozen inner-city fifth graders underneath the great sphere at the Rose Center for Earth and Space in New York. I ceremoniously extracted a compact flash card from a digital camera. One child placed the memory card in a glass test tube. Another child weighed the tube and recorded the data. Yet another walked it over to a NASA employee standing on a raised platform, who gravely and graciously accepted the tube and put it in a large padded box. The memory card, loaded with pictures of the children's goony, smiling faces, was going into outer space.

NASA had a program called the Space Experiment Module in which students all across the country, from K through 12, got a chance to place simple experiments aboard the space shuttle. These experiments mostly tested how various objects respond to spaceflight: One infamous SEM experiment determined how well cotton candy stood up to the radiation and weightlessness of outer space.

These kids were in my Saturday astrophysics class at the Rose Center. When I told them we had been selected for the SEM program, they refused to believe me. Fifth grade kids didn't get to send stuff into outer space! I finally convinced them that it was for real, that they really could design experiments and put them on the shuttle. And the children lit up as if they were going into orbit themselves.

Salon.com > Patrick Di Justo

The last great swine flu epidemic

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