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11th September 2013: The world's gone mad and I'm the only one who knows
13th August 2013: Black is white. Fact. End of.
11th August 2013: Electric cars, not as green as they're painted?
18th June 2013: Wrinklies unite, you have nothing to lose but your walking frames!
17th May 2013: Some actual FACTS about climate change (for a change) from actual scientists ...
10th May 2013: An article about that poison gas, carbon dioxide, and other scientific facts (not) ...
10th May 2013: We need to see past the sex and look at the crimes: is justice being served?
8th May 2013: So, who would you trust to treat your haemorrhoids, Theresa May?
8th May 2013: Why should citizens in the 21st Century fear the law so much?
30th April 2013: What the GOS says today, the rest of the world realises tomorrow ...
30th April 2013: You couldn't make it up, could you? Luckily you don't need to ...
29th April 2013: a vote for NONE OF THE ABOVE, because THE ABOVE are crap ...
28th April 2013: what goes around, comes around?
19th April 2013: everyone's a victim these days ...
10th April 2013: Thatcher is dead; long live Thatcher!
8th April 2013: Poor people are such a nuisance. Just give them loads of money and they'll go away ...
26th March 2013: Censorship is alive and well and coming for you ...
25th March 2013: Just do your job properly, is that too much to ask?
25th March 2013: So, what do you think caused your heterosexuality?
20th March 2013: Feminists - puritans, hypocrites or just plain stupid?
18th March 2013: How Nazi Germany paved the way for modern governance?
13th March 2013: Time we all grew up and lived in the real world ...
12th March 2013: Hindenburg crash mystery solved? - don't you believe it!
6th March 2013: Is this the real GOS?
5th March 2013: All that's wrong with taxes
25th February 2013: The self-seeking MP who is trying to bring Britain down ...
24th February 2013: Why can't newspapers just tell the truth?
22nd February 2013: Trial by jury - a radical proposal
13th February 2013: A little verse for two very old people ...
6th February 2013: It's not us after all, it's worms
6th February 2013: Now here's a powerful argument FOR gay marriage ...
4th February 2013: There's no such thing as equality because we're not all the same ...
28th January 2013: Global Warming isn't over - IT'S HIDING!
25th January 2013: Global Warmers: mad, bad and dangerous to know ...
25th January 2013: Bullying ego-trippers, not animal lovers ...
19th January 2013: We STILL haven't got our heads straight about gays ...
16th January 2013: Bullying ego-trippers, not animal lovers ...
11th January 2013: What it's like being English ...
7th January 2013: Bleat, bleat, if it saves the life of just one child ...
7th January 2013: How best to put it? 'Up yours, Argentina'?
7th January 2013: Chucking even more of other people's money around ...
6th January 2013: Chucking other people's money around ...
30th December 2012: The BBC is just crap, basically ...
30th December 2012: We mourn the passing of a genuine Grumpy Old Sod ...
30th December 2012: How an official body sets out to ruin Christmas ...
16th December 2012: Why should we pardon Alan Turing when he did nothing wrong?
15th December 2012: When will social workers face up to their REAL responsibility?
15th December 2012: Unfair trading by a firm in Bognor Regis ...
14th December 2012: Now the company that sells your data is pretending to act as watchdog ...
7th December 2012: There's a war between cars and bikes, apparently, and  most of us never noticed!
26th November 2012: The bottom line - social workers are just plain stupid ...
20th November 2012: So, David Eyke was right all along, then?
15th November 2012: MPs don't mind dishing it out, but when it's them in the firing line ...
14th November 2012: The BBC has a policy, it seems, about which truths it wants to tell ...
12th November 2012: Big Brother, coming to a school near you ...
9th November 2012: Yet another celebrity who thinks, like Jimmy Saville, that he can behave just as he likes because he's famous ...
5th November 2012: Whose roads are they, anyway? After all, we paid for them ...
7th May 2012: How politicians could end droughts at a stroke if they chose ...
6th May 2012: The BBC, still determined to keep us in a fog of ignorance ...
2nd May 2012: A sense of proportion lacking?
24th April 2012: Told you so, told you so, told you so ...
15th April 2012: Aah, sweet ickle polar bears in danger, aah ...
15th April 2012: An open letter to Anglian Water ...
30th March 2012: Now they want to cure us if we don't believe their lies ...
28th February 2012: Just how useful is a degree? Not very.
27th February 2012: ... so many ways to die ...
15th February 2012: DO go to Jamaica because you definitely WON'T get murdered with a machete. Ms Fox says so ...
31st January 2012: We don't make anything any more
27th January 2012: There's always a word for it, they say, and if there isn't we'll invent one
26th January 2012: Literary criticism on GOS? How posh!
12th December 2011: Plain speaking by a scientist about the global warming fraud
9th December 2011: Who trusts scientists? Apart from the BBC, of course?
7th December 2011: All in all, not a good week for British justice ...
9th November 2011: Well what d'you know, the law really IS a bit of an ass ...

 

 
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Perhaps we're all being a bit insouciant in our dismissal of the dangers of swine flu, and our condemnation of the media hype about it. Here is Bill Bryson writing in 2003 about events in 1918 ....
 

 
It is sometimes called the Great Swine Flu epidemic and sometimes the Great Spanish Flu epidemic, but in either case it was ferocious. The First World War killed 21 million people in four years: swine flu did the same in its first four months. Almost 80% of American casualties in the First World War came not from enemy fire, but from flu. In some units the mortality rate was as high as 80%.
 
Swine flu arose as a normal, non-lethal flu in the spring of 1918, but somehow, over the following months - no one knows how or where - it mutated into something more severe. A fifth of victims suffered only mild symptoms, but the rest became gravely ill and many died. Some succumbed within hours; others held on for a few days.
 
In the United States the first deaths were recorded among sailors in Boston in late August 1918, but the epidemic quickly spread to all parts of the country. Schools closed, public entertainments were shut down, people everywhere wore masks. It did little good. Between Autumn 1918 and spring the following year, 548,452 people died of the flu in America. The toll in Britain was 220,000, with similar numbers in France and Germany. No one knows the global toll, as records in the third world were often poor, but it was not less than 20 million and probably more like 50 million. Some estimates have put the global total as high as 100 million.
 
In an attempt to devise a vaccine, medical authorities conducted experiments on volunteers at a military prison on Deer Island in Boston Harbour. The prisoners were promised pardons if they survived a battery of tests. These tests were rigorous to say the least. First, the subjects were injected with infected lung tissue taken from the dead and then sprayed in the eyes, nose and mouth with infectious aerosols. If they still failed to succumb, they had their throats swabbed with discharges taken straight for the sick and dying. If all else failed they were required to sit open-mouthed while a gravely ill victim was sat up slightly and made to cough into their faces.
 
Out of - somewhat amazingly - three hundred men who volunteered, the doctors chose sixty-two for the tests. None contracted the flu - not one. The only person who did grow ill was the ward doctor, who swiftly died. The probable explanation for this is that the epidemic had passed through the prison a few weeks earlier and the volunteers, all of whom had survived that visitation, had a natural immunity.
 
Much about the 1918 flu epidemic is understood poorly or not at all. One mystery is how it erupted suddenly, all over, in places separated by oceans, mountain ranges and other earthly impediments. A virus can survive for no more than a few hours outside a host body, so how could it appear in Madrid, Bombay and Philadelphia all in the same week?
 
The probable answer is that it was incubated and spread by people who had only slight symptoms or none at all. Even in normal outbreaks, about 10% of people in any given population have the flu but are unaware of it because they experience no ill effects. And because they remain in circulation they tend to be great spreaders of the disease.
 
That would account for the 1918 outbreak's widespread distribution, but it still doesn't explain how it managed to lie low for several months before erupting so explosively at more or less the same time all over. Even more mysterious is that it was most devastating to people in the prime of life. Flu normally is hardest on infants and the elderly, but in the 1918 outbreak deaths were overwhelmingly among people in their twenties and thirties. Older people may have benefited from resistance gained from an earlier exposure to the same strain, but why the very young were similarly spared is unknown. The greatest mystery of all is why the 1918 flu was so ferociously deadly when most flus are not. We still have no idea.
 
From time to time certain strains of virus return. A disagreeable Russian virus known as H1N1 caused severe outbreaks over wide areas in 1933, then again in the 1950s and yet again in the 1970s. Where it went in the meantime each time is uncertain. One suggestion is that viruses hide out unnoticed in populations of wild animals before trying their hand at a new generation of humans. No one can rule out the possibility that the great swine flu epidemic might once again rear its head.
 
(Taken from "A Short History of Nearly Everything")
 

 
The GOS says: Scary stuff.
 
I have little medical knowledge. Bryson seems to be making a distinction between swine flu and H1N1. I thought they were one and the same? Perhaps some kind reader can explain?

 

 
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