November 9, 2009

What’s in a Plan

By Kelley Luckstein

This year's flu season has been extremely hard on the area's health care facilities. There is a strong seasonal flu outbreak, only compounded by the eight month old H1N1 virus. This begs the question, were we even prepared for something like this to happen?...

 

Infectious Disease Physican Priya Sampathkumar with the Mayo Clinic tells KIMT, our world has seen something worse than this year's flu season, the 1918 spanish influenza pandemic. It killed 50 million people right after WWI, or about 3% of the world's population. Infecting an estimated 500 million people. Sampathkumar says, "There have been several pandemics since then, so we had a big pandemic in '57 and then another one in '76, so there have been pandemics. None as bad as the one in 1918."

 

KIMT, by Gwen Siewert, 11/6/09

Tags: flu season, H1N1, Infectious Diseases

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