{"id":551,"date":"2009-04-30T11:06:11","date_gmt":"2009-04-30T09:06:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/?p=551"},"modified":"2015-04-21T18:54:40","modified_gmt":"2015-04-21T16:54:40","slug":"were-all-going-to-die-or-maybe-not","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/were-all-going-to-die-or-maybe-not\/","title":{"rendered":"We’re all going to die (or maybe not)"},"content":{"rendered":"

I remember the swine flu<\/span>. It came around in 1976, when I was a kid. We were all going to die.<\/p>\n

The parallels to the 1918 influenza, which killed between 20 and 100 million people, did not go unnoticed. Soldiers fell ill<\/span> at a military base. The virus attacked young people. The symptoms were particularly severe. If the flu spread, millions could die.<\/p>\n

But it didn’t spread. In fact, only one person actually died of it<\/a>. He was a 19-year-old army private<\/span> who \u2014 against doctor’s orders \u2014 had gone on an 80-kilometre hike<\/span> in wet, cold weather after already taking ill.<\/p>\n

Weaker forms of the 1918 influenza virus had come back in 1957 and 1968, and the government wanted to be extra careful in 1976, which was an election year. So 40 million people were vaccinated<\/span>. The flu stopped months before anyone noticed that about 500 people had died of a different disease, believed to be a side effect of the vaccine<\/span>.<\/p>\n

Why did we overreact? I think it’s because we lived in a disaster culture. We were told that a powerful earthquake<\/span> would push California into the sea. Killer bees<\/a> were flying in from Central America. Aliens in UFOs were kidnapping people<\/a> and mutilating<\/span> cattle<\/span>.<\/p>\n

The mid-1970s saw every kind of catastrophe played out in films with such titles as Earthquake<\/i><\/a> and The Towering Inferno<\/i><\/a>. Week after week, we saw our cities destroyed by fires, invasions, plagues of insects and marauding<\/span> apes<\/span>.<\/p>\n