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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.

Hospital-acquired infections are now killing more people every year in the United States than die from AIDS or cancer or car accidents combined - about 100,000.

Even the pandemic flu of 1918 only killed one to two percent of the people who were infected.

The worst pandemic in modern history was the Spanish flu of 1918, which killed tens of millions of people. Today, with how interconnected the world is, it would spread faster.

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.

In spite of the advances of medicine, deathly epidemics are more menacing than ever before.

Smallpox, which spreads by respiration and kills roughly one in three of those infected, took hundreds of millions of lives during a recorded history dating to Pharaonic Egypt. The last case was in 1978, and the disease was declared eradicated on May 8, 1980.

Pandemics do not occur randomly. From malaria and influenza to AIDS and SARS, the lethal microbes have come, in the first instance, from animals, especially wild animals. And we increasingly know which parts of the world pose the greatest risk for future incursions.

I guess growing up I realized that there is really this huge epidemic in a city like Los Angeles, and many other cities, where they put down thousands upon thousands of animals every day.