Scared of Ebola? Consider The Flue Pandemic of 1918-1919

I'm in the midst of reading Dennis Lahane's excellent novel, Any Given Day. It gives a harrowing account of what happened in Boston after American troops came home from World War I carrying the flu virus with them.

He describes the health care system in Boston as so overwhelmed, that they could do nothing beyond picking up the dead bodies. It sounds exactly like what is happening in West Africa today.

Lahane did the historical research, of course, that makes a novel like this more than just a good story--which it most certainly is. According to the U.S. Public Health Service, 675,000 people, out of a population at the time of 105 million, died from the flu in just a few months. Hundreds of thousands of others were left orphaned or widowed. And, workers in those days, when they were trying to organize, had no health insurance and no pensions, so those widows and orphans were impoverished beyond our imaginations. Lahane, in this 2008 novel, offers a good look at those working conditions as well.

So, scary as Ebola is, let's take a deep breath and put this in perspective as people living in a country with a highly-developed health care system. And that goes in spades for the media outlets, both broadcast and in print, that are scaring people silly both for profit and to try to pin the outbreak of this disease on President Obama. ##