We had a week off in the middle of shooting, but as soon as everyone stopped, we all went down with six different types of flu and other unmentionable diseases.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
More than 50 million people around the world died during the 1918-1919 flu pandemic. That's why we have epidemiologists all over the world tracking whether new strains of flu emerge.
I returned to upstate NY where I just laid in bed for days with a fever that just wouldn't go away. After more of this, I grew increasingly sure that this was not simply the flu!
The flu is very unpredictable when it begins and in how it takes off.
We saw in 2003 the beginnings of an outbreak of an illness called SARS. SARS ended up killing 800 people which is a significant number of deaths, but nowhere near as high as it could have been.
Now, you might think of flu as just a really bad cold, but it can be a death sentence. Every year, 36,000 people in the United States die of seasonal flu. In the developing world, the data is much sketchier, but the death toll is almost certainly higher.
With the absence of a flu vaccination last year, I did not take a flu shot; but there is still some immunity that carries over from year to year; but about every 30 years, there is a major change in the genetics of the flu virus.
Seasonal flu is now a pandemic that lasts for years and years because you've got so many people that it's jumping back between northern and southern hemispheres and moving itself around the world. By the time it gets back to where it started, it's changed sufficiently so that people are no longer immune.
Even the pandemic flu of 1918 only killed one to two percent of the people who were infected.
The best thing about getting a flu shot is that you never again need to wash your hands. That's how I see it.
A pandemic influenza would mean widespread infection essentially throughout every region of the world.
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