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What pandemics have people in the west directly experienced in living memory? As far as I am aware, all pandemics in recent memory have happened in Africa or As

What pandemics have people in the west directly experienced in living memory? As far as I am aware, all pandemics in recent memory have happened in Africa or Asia.

NikolaeVarius 7y ago
AIDS, Swine Flu, probably MMR?
- toasterlovin 7y ago
  AIDS: easily avoided MMR: easily avoided That leaves swine flu. According to this Wikipedia page about the 2009 flu pandemic (which is what the term “swine flu” references, as best as I can tell), worldwide fatalities are estimated at 575 thousand (upper bound) and worldwide infections are estimated at 700 million (lower bound). Given those numbers, the worst case fatality rate is 0.08%. Then there is this quote: > A follow-up study done in September 2010 showed that the risk of serious illness resulting from the 2009 H1N1 flu was no higher than that of the yearly seasonal flu. So my point remains: no one in the west had direct experience of a pandemic. Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_flu_pandemic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_flu_pandemic
  - NikolaeVarius 7y ago
    Wow, AIDS and MMR has not affected the western world. That's a new one.
    - toasterlovin 7y ago
      That is not what I have said anywhere in this thread.
      - NikolaeVarius 7y ago
        >> So my point remains: no one in the west had direct experience of a pandemic.
        toasterlovin 7y ago
        From Wikipedia (pandemic and epidemic entries): > A pandemic (from Greek πᾶν pan "all" and δῆμος demos "people") is a disease epidemic that has spread across a large region, for instance multiple continents, or worldwide. > An epidemic (from Greek ἐπί epi "upon or above" and δῆμος demos "people") is the rapid spread of disease to a large number of people in a given population within a short period of time. AIDS does not meet those definitions, unless you restrict “given population” to mean male homosexuals or recipients of blood transfusions.
        Retric 7y ago
        AIDS cases have been to every country in the world which easily satisfies as a pandemic. Epidemic is different with Covid19 not yet qualifying. What’s useful about separating the ideas is discovering the root cause. Scurvy used to be epidemic among sailers, making it easier to find the root cause and treatments. Highly localized diseases generally have a specific local cause.
        toasterlovin 7y ago
        AIDS has not spread very rapidly. It has taken nearly 4 decades to reach its current spread. Covid has the potential to infect most people in the span of 12-18 months. It’s categorically different. And AIDS is easily avoided!
        Retric 7y ago
        Rate of spread has nothing to do with the definition of pandemic. It took literally thousands of years for Smallpox to reach the America’s, but it achieved worldwide spread before eradication. Malaria on the other hand has also killed hundreds of millions of people but as it’s a tropical disease with 93% of the cases occurring in Africa it’s not a pandemic. Again person to person spread results in pandemics, making a definition based on geographic spread useful.
  - Jeema101 7y ago
    AIDS was not easily avoided. The blood supply was not screened early on. Many people early in the epidemic were infected from simple transfusions. Famous American tennis player Arthur Ashe contracted it and died in this manner.
    - perl4ever 7y ago
      It's not possible to screen for certain if someone has just acquired HIV, so to this day, they try to exclude people with risk factors from donating blood. Which then is treated as a human rights issue by some.
      - TomMarius 7y ago
        I am from Europe so it seems a little weird to me - is donating blood your right in the USA?
        quickthrowman 7y ago
        No, there are a series of screening questions that rule out high-risk donors (gay men, IV drug users, and travelers to high/risk areas are disqualified from donating). All blood is tested regardless.
        perl4ever 7y ago
        However, not everybody agrees that all of the questions are necessary or appropriately worded.
        TomMarius 7y ago
        That is the same as here, but how is it a human rights issue?
        DoreenMichele 7y ago
        If you are gay, they don't want you to donate blood. The problem is that if you are, say, at work and they do a blood drive and you say "I can't. Sorry." that potentially outs you to your coworkers that you are gay or have some other issue that disqualifies your blood. In practice, they will let you donate and then mark it for destruction so you can hide the fact from your coworkers that you don't qualify. (Or they did at one time.) This was a big issue in the US military during the "don't ask, don't tell" era where they would throw you out if they knew, but official policy was to encourage you to just remain closeted. Being outed as gay was career ending if you were career military at that time. Blood drives are common in the military. They had to have some mechanism to honor the "don't ask, don't tell" policy and let you keep hiding your sexual orientation.
SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
In addition to AIDS, there were major American flu pandemics in 2009 and 1968. 1957 too, depending on how old you consider to be "living memory" - many federal leaders were teenagers at the time.
- microcolonel 7y ago
  So basically nothing on this scale.
  - SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
    For years, all diagnosed AIDS patients were expected to die within 12 months. It wasn't spread as broadly, and the flu pandemics weren't as deadly, but the general concepts that pandemics can strike hard and fast were definitely within leaders' personal knowledge.
    - toasterlovin 7y ago
      But you don’t have to shut down the economy to deal with AIDS because it’s sexually transmitted. That’s my point: the vast majority of people have never had to make serious changes to their behavior or lifestyle to avoid contagion before.
      - SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
        That I agree with, but as far as I can tell the degree of measures we're trying to take are unprecedented even in non-living memory. School closures and public gathering bans, sure, but those measures happen pretty frequently during lesser scale outbreaks. If anyone tried to ban social calls during the Spanish Flu, I'm not aware of it.
        lisper 7y ago
        They didn't. That's why it killed tens of millions of people back when the global population was about 1/4 of what it is today, and mobility was much more constrained. No jets in 1918. The expected death toll from Covid, assuming an overall mortality rate of 1%, would be about 75 million people. So far the death toll worldwide is about 13,000. That's a big number, but only about 0.02% of the expected total without intervention.
pmorici 7y ago
The closest thing that people in the US might have a living memory of is the polio epidemic in the US in 1952. [0] Granted anyone who is old enough to have lived through that and remember it is probably on lock down in a nursing home right about now. The people in power now would have been children around that time so who knows if it would have a made an impression on them. [0] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2012/10/16/162670836/wiping-out-polio-how-the-u-s-snuffed-out-a-killer https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2012/10/16/1626708...
- akiselev 7y ago
  Mitch Mcconnell, the person who sets the legislative agenda in the Senate, wrote this in his memoir: It’s one of my life’s great fortunes that Sister’s home was only about sixty miles from Warm Springs, Georgia, where President Franklin D. Roosevelt had established a polio treatment center and where he’d often travel to find relief from the polio that paralyzed him at the age of thirty-nine. My mother took me there every chance she had. The nurses would teach her how to perform exercises meant to rehabilitate my leg while also emphasizing her need to make me believe I could walk, even though I wasn’t allowed to. I bet it left an impression.
  - dhosek 7y ago
    Apparently not enough of one.
- lazyasciiart 7y ago
  It made a huge impression on many children in the 50s still - there were still tens of thousands dying and being paralyzed each year until the late 50s, and by this point they were predominantly small children being affected. My parents are in their early 60s and they remember it well - when she was five her friend was partially paralyzed for life by it. https://www.historyofvaccines.org/content/us-polio-cases-1952-1962 https://www.historyofvaccines.org/content/us-polio-cases-195... had friends who died. They were given behavior restrictions.
  - deleted 7y ago
wbronitsky 7y ago
Comments like this are exactly where HN fails the hardest right now. This is someone very strongly asserting that their ignorance should be listened to. It would be trivially easy to google the actual facts in this case, and yet this person chooses to instead to assert that ignorance is the better solution. I understand we aren’t supposed to get personal on HN, but people are causing the site to devolve, and we should hold these people accountable to try and fix the issue. Please use facts.
bsder 7y ago
AIDS? Legionnaire's disease? People forget the panic these caused until they were understood. In addition, we have had some horrible flus over the years. 1994(ish) and 1977(ish) stick out in my mind. Anyone who says: "Oh, it's just a nasty flu" has never had a bad flu. I can't imagine being more sick than being stuck in bed for two solid weeks not wanting to move because it hurts so bad but you have to make yourself some food and then choke it down only to throw it up. And Covid-19 is WORSE THAT THAT! Holy hell, people, I'd do ANYTHING to avoid that.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  I had a couple of weeks paralysis as a result of a bad flue in my teens. Scary as hell.
  - 1996 7y ago
    Guillan Barre syndrome (paralysis) can be seen after vaccines or viral infection
    - jacquesm 7y ago
      Yes, but that usually lasts a lot longer. My stepdad had that and nearly died from it. Spent a long time in a ventilator and the remainder of his life in a wheelchair.
    - navaati 7y ago
      Urgh, yet another auto-immune disease ? I really hope that a massive breakthrough in medical knowledge will happen regarding that general subject. Unfortunately the matter seems to be more complex than anything I, as a developer, can imagine…
onetimemanytime 7y ago
>>As far as I am aware... Doesn't really matter what you are aware or not. USA and the major countries have thousands of people that do just that, monitor epidemics. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-nCoV/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-nCoV/index.html That's their job and they have ways to notify leadership. Other look out for steroids, others for hackers hacking power plants, others look out for terror threats and so on. It turns out that out intel services knew about this and its potential since January but civilian leader more or less ignored it. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/us-intelligence-reports-from-january-and-february-warned-about-a-likely-pandemic/2020/03/20/299d8cda-6ad5-11ea-b5f1-a5a804158597_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/us-intellig...
- jacquesm 7y ago
  > It turns out that out intel services knew about this and its potential since January I would hope they knew about it since January because I knew about it since January and likely so did you. And since the beginning of February I've been warning people in ever more concrete terms. Here it was, right here on HN in January: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22146446 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22146446 There may be even older ones, for instance, this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22000761 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22000761 Which linked to: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-51047576 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-51047576 which in turn links to: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-50984025 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-50984025 Which is the oldest western article I've been able to find. Are there older ones?
  - fragmede 7y ago
    On HN, the oldest I was able to find is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21926713 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21926713 linking to https://www.dw.com/en/china-investigates-sars-like-virus-as-dozens-struck-by-pneumonia/a-51843861 https://www.dw.com/en/china-investigates-sars-like-virus-as-... from Jan 1st, which is 8 days earlier than your second link, but with only 3 points and zero comments, I'm not sure how much that counts. The BBC story that you linked to is from Jan 3rd, the AP had a story[1] on the 5th, so the public had opportunity to know about it in early January. I can't get Reddit's search to cooperate, so I can't say if there's an earlier mention there (plus Google's dates about Reddit don't agree with Reddit's). Wikipedia has an early timeline page with a lot of details.[2] Public statements were made on December 30th about pneumonia of unknown cause. If there had been a US pandemic response team, we could have started mobilizing December 30th. Hong Kong did. [1] https://apnews.com/7cfe53b9e7c7509c1f61c6c09e6fc4e6 https://apnews.com/7cfe53b9e7c7509c1f61c6c09e6fc4e6 [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_2019%E2%80%9320_coronavirus_pandemic_in_November_2019_%E2%80%93_January_2020#17_November_2019 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_2019%E2%80%932...
ptero 7y ago
I am pretty sure H1N1 (aka swine flu) was declared a worldwide pandemic by the WHO.
- toasterlovin 7y ago
  Fatality rate similar to the normal flu.
  - toasterlovin 7y ago
    In Case you think I’m making this up, here’s what I said elsewhere in this thread: > According to this Wikipedia page about the 2009 flu pandemic (which is what the term “swine flu” references, as best as I can tell), worldwide fatalities are estimated at 575 thousand (upper bound) and worldwide infections are estimated at 700 million (lower bound). Given those numbers, the worst case fatality rate is 0.08%. Then there is this quote: > A follow-up study done in September 2010 showed that the risk of serious illness resulting from the 2009 H1N1 flu was no higher than that of the yearly seasonal flu. > Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_flu_pandemic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_flu_pandemic reply
  - Der_Einzige 7y ago
    Literally "just the flu bro"
  - throw9o8765 7y ago
    At the time it was happening, no one knew that. The media was comparing it to SARS.
    - toasterlovin 7y ago
      Okay, but my original point is that nobody in the West has gone through something like what we’re going through. You’re actually making my point even stronger: not only has no one in the West ever actually lived through a pandemic that took a bunch of lives and requires societal level sacrifice, we’ve all had false alarms that have made us less likely to take potential pandemics seriously.
spodek 7y ago
Obesity, according to this NIH document https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28292617 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28292617 on Pubmed: > Obesity pandemic: causes, consequences, and solutions-but do we have the will? > Abstract > Obesity has become pandemic owing to an obesogenic environment (inexpensive calorie dense food, technologies and structure of communities that reduce or replace physical activity, and inexpensive nonphysical entertainment) and excessive emphasis on low fat intake resulting in excessive intake of simple carbohydrates and sugar. . .
- toasterlovin 7y ago
  Until we find an infectious cause of obesity, calling it an obesity pandemic is a rhetorical act it grounded in the widely accepted meaning of the word.
  - burfog 7y ago
    Wikipedia's page on Adenoviridae lists these human adenovirus types that cause obesity or adipogenesis: HAdV-A type 31; HAdV-C type 5; HAdV-D types 9, 36, 37 One of the references: Voss JD, Atkinson RL, Dhurandhar NV (November 2015). "Role of adenoviruses in obesity". Reviews in Medical Virology. 25 (6): https://zenodo.org/record/1229348 https://zenodo.org/record/1229348 So yes, obesity can be caused by contagious disease.
    - toasterlovin 7y ago
      Obesity can be caused by a infectious disease is not the same thing as obesity, in general, being caused by an infectious disease. It would have to be caused by a contagious, in general, to be able to describe the widespread prevalence of obesity as a pandemic, since the term pandemic is concerned with infectious diseases.
  - gindely 7y ago
    A pandemic is a form of epidemic (according to Wikipedia's definition, which you have referred to). An epidemic is an outbreak of a disease (according to Wikipedia's definition, which you have referred to). A disease is a particular abnormal condition that negatively affects the structure or function of all or part of an organism, and that is not due to any immediate external injury... A disease may be caused by external factors such as pathogens or by internal dysfunctions. (according to Wikipedia's definition, which is included by link by its definition of epidemic). There is no requirement on the definition of epidemic that you have referred to that requires it to be infectious. Please pick a definition and stick to it. You want a pandemic to be a global outbreak of a disease to which the overwhelming majority of the population is susceptible and which is spread via a pathogen without physical contact. If there's an authority that uses that definition, find them and cite them. Otherwise please stick the definitions you've already cited and move on.
bogomipz 7y ago
The HIV/AIDS pandemic, not only recent but also one of the most destructive in human history as well. [1] [1] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5531a1.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5531a1.htm
- quickthrowman 7y ago
  Please explain how a disease transmitted by unprotected sex and IV drug use (once the blood supply was screened) is in any way comparable to an airborne illness. It’s not, the vast majority of western society (hell, eastern too) has never been at risk of contracting HIV/AIDS. The vast majority are at risk of COVID-19. HIV/AIDS is technically a pandemic, but not one that affects all populations/demographics. Completely different.
  - bogomipz 7y ago
    You do realize there was a time where HIV/AIDS wasn't at all understood right? HIV/AIDS is not "technically a pandemic" it is a pandemic period. Pandemic is a geographic relative term it does not need to to "affect all populations/demographics." That is not a qualification. That appears to be some something you made up. The role of epidemiology is the same whether something is a flu pandemic or some other disease. The reason Dr Deborah Birx is qualified in her current role is because of her research in the early days of the HIV/AIDs pandemic. Nobody is claiming she is not qualified because that wasn't a flu pandemic.
    - toasterlovin 7y ago
      From another reply of mine in this thread: > AIDS is not a pandemic. Pandemic requires epidemic, which requires rapid spread in a short period of time. AIDS has been slow. Calling it a pandemic is, IMO, motivated by politics (it mostly affects male homosexuals and sub-Saharan Africans). Ctrl-F for my discussion elsewhere in this thread.
      - bogomipz 7y ago
        So you're stating that AIDS was never an epidemic? Right. And that's based on your opinion I guess? Well there's actual facts too: "In late 1983, the global presence of the mysterious virus motivated European authorities and the WHO to classify the growing number of diagnoses as an epidemic. In addition to the outbreak in the U.S., patients with similar symptoms were documented in 15 European countries, 7 Latin American countries, Canada, Zaire, Haiti, Australia and Japan. Of particular concern was an outbreak in central Africa among heterosexual patients."[1] [1] https://www.publichealth.org/public-awareness/hiv-aids/origin-story/ https://www.publichealth.org/public-awareness/hiv-aids/origi...
nkohari 7y ago
It was barely 10 years ago. Between April 2009 and April 2010, H1N1 (swine flu) sickened 60.8M people in the US alone. [0] [0] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/2009-h1n1-pandemic.html https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/2009-h1n1-pandemi...

What pandemics have people in the west directly experienced in living memory? As far as I am aware, all pandemics in recent memory have happened in Africa or Asia.

NikolaeVarius 7y ago

AIDS, Swine Flu, probably MMR?

toasterlovin 7y ago
AIDS: easily avoided MMR: easily avoided That leaves swine flu. According to this Wikipedia page about the 2009 flu pandemic (which is what the term “swine flu” references, as best as I can tell), worldwide fatalities are estimated at 575 thousand (upper bound) and worldwide infections are estimated at 700 million (lower bound). Given those numbers, the worst case fatality rate is 0.08%. Then there is this quote: > A follow-up study done in September 2010 showed that the risk of serious illness resulting from the 2009 H1N1 flu was no higher than that of the yearly seasonal flu. So my point remains: no one in the west had direct experience of a pandemic. Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_flu_pandemic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_flu_pandemic
- NikolaeVarius 7y ago
  Wow, AIDS and MMR has not affected the western world. That's a new one.
  - toasterlovin 7y ago
    That is not what I have said anywhere in this thread.
    - NikolaeVarius 7y ago
      >> So my point remains: no one in the west had direct experience of a pandemic.
      - toasterlovin 7y ago
        From Wikipedia (pandemic and epidemic entries): > A pandemic (from Greek πᾶν pan "all" and δῆμος demos "people") is a disease epidemic that has spread across a large region, for instance multiple continents, or worldwide. > An epidemic (from Greek ἐπί epi "upon or above" and δῆμος demos "people") is the rapid spread of disease to a large number of people in a given population within a short period of time. AIDS does not meet those definitions, unless you restrict “given population” to mean male homosexuals or recipients of blood transfusions.
        Retric 7y ago
        AIDS cases have been to every country in the world which easily satisfies as a pandemic. Epidemic is different with Covid19 not yet qualifying. What’s useful about separating the ideas is discovering the root cause. Scurvy used to be epidemic among sailers, making it easier to find the root cause and treatments. Highly localized diseases generally have a specific local cause.
        toasterlovin 7y ago
        AIDS has not spread very rapidly. It has taken nearly 4 decades to reach its current spread. Covid has the potential to infect most people in the span of 12-18 months. It’s categorically different. And AIDS is easily avoided!
        Retric 7y ago
        Rate of spread has nothing to do with the definition of pandemic. It took literally thousands of years for Smallpox to reach the America’s, but it achieved worldwide spread before eradication. Malaria on the other hand has also killed hundreds of millions of people but as it’s a tropical disease with 93% of the cases occurring in Africa it’s not a pandemic. Again person to person spread results in pandemics, making a definition based on geographic spread useful.
- Jeema101 7y ago
  AIDS was not easily avoided. The blood supply was not screened early on. Many people early in the epidemic were infected from simple transfusions. Famous American tennis player Arthur Ashe contracted it and died in this manner.
  - perl4ever 7y ago
    It's not possible to screen for certain if someone has just acquired HIV, so to this day, they try to exclude people with risk factors from donating blood. Which then is treated as a human rights issue by some.
    - TomMarius 7y ago
      I am from Europe so it seems a little weird to me - is donating blood your right in the USA?
      - quickthrowman 7y ago
        No, there are a series of screening questions that rule out high-risk donors (gay men, IV drug users, and travelers to high/risk areas are disqualified from donating). All blood is tested regardless.
        perl4ever 7y ago
        However, not everybody agrees that all of the questions are necessary or appropriately worded.
        TomMarius 7y ago
        That is the same as here, but how is it a human rights issue?
        DoreenMichele 7y ago
        If you are gay, they don't want you to donate blood. The problem is that if you are, say, at work and they do a blood drive and you say "I can't. Sorry." that potentially outs you to your coworkers that you are gay or have some other issue that disqualifies your blood. In practice, they will let you donate and then mark it for destruction so you can hide the fact from your coworkers that you don't qualify. (Or they did at one time.) This was a big issue in the US military during the "don't ask, don't tell" era where they would throw you out if they knew, but official policy was to encourage you to just remain closeted. Being outed as gay was career ending if you were career military at that time. Blood drives are common in the military. They had to have some mechanism to honor the "don't ask, don't tell" policy and let you keep hiding your sexual orientation.

SpicyLemonZest 7y ago

In addition to AIDS, there were major American flu pandemics in 2009 and 1968. 1957 too, depending on how old you consider to be "living memory" - many federal leaders were teenagers at the time.

microcolonel 7y ago
So basically nothing on this scale.
- SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
  For years, all diagnosed AIDS patients were expected to die within 12 months. It wasn't spread as broadly, and the flu pandemics weren't as deadly, but the general concepts that pandemics can strike hard and fast were definitely within leaders' personal knowledge.
  - toasterlovin 7y ago
    But you don’t have to shut down the economy to deal with AIDS because it’s sexually transmitted. That’s my point: the vast majority of people have never had to make serious changes to their behavior or lifestyle to avoid contagion before.
    - SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
      That I agree with, but as far as I can tell the degree of measures we're trying to take are unprecedented even in non-living memory. School closures and public gathering bans, sure, but those measures happen pretty frequently during lesser scale outbreaks. If anyone tried to ban social calls during the Spanish Flu, I'm not aware of it.
      - lisper 7y ago
        They didn't. That's why it killed tens of millions of people back when the global population was about 1/4 of what it is today, and mobility was much more constrained. No jets in 1918. The expected death toll from Covid, assuming an overall mortality rate of 1%, would be about 75 million people. So far the death toll worldwide is about 13,000. That's a big number, but only about 0.02% of the expected total without intervention.

pmorici 7y ago

The closest thing that people in the US might have a living memory of is the polio epidemic in the US in 1952. [0] Granted anyone who is old enough to have lived through that and remember it is probably on lock down in a nursing home right about now. The people in power now would have been children around that time so who knows if it would have a made an impression on them. [0] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2012/10/16/162670836/wiping-out-polio-how-the-u-s-snuffed-out-a-killer https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2012/10/16/1626708...

akiselev 7y ago
Mitch Mcconnell, the person who sets the legislative agenda in the Senate, wrote this in his memoir: It’s one of my life’s great fortunes that Sister’s home was only about sixty miles from Warm Springs, Georgia, where President Franklin D. Roosevelt had established a polio treatment center and where he’d often travel to find relief from the polio that paralyzed him at the age of thirty-nine. My mother took me there every chance she had. The nurses would teach her how to perform exercises meant to rehabilitate my leg while also emphasizing her need to make me believe I could walk, even though I wasn’t allowed to. I bet it left an impression.
- dhosek 7y ago
  Apparently not enough of one.
lazyasciiart 7y ago
It made a huge impression on many children in the 50s still - there were still tens of thousands dying and being paralyzed each year until the late 50s, and by this point they were predominantly small children being affected. My parents are in their early 60s and they remember it well - when she was five her friend was partially paralyzed for life by it. https://www.historyofvaccines.org/content/us-polio-cases-1952-1962 https://www.historyofvaccines.org/content/us-polio-cases-195... had friends who died. They were given behavior restrictions.
- deleted 7y ago

wbronitsky 7y ago

Comments like this are exactly where HN fails the hardest right now. This is someone very strongly asserting that their ignorance should be listened to. It would be trivially easy to google the actual facts in this case, and yet this person chooses to instead to assert that ignorance is the better solution. I understand we aren’t supposed to get personal on HN, but people are causing the site to devolve, and we should hold these people accountable to try and fix the issue. Please use facts.

bsder 7y ago

AIDS? Legionnaire's disease? People forget the panic these caused until they were understood. In addition, we have had some horrible flus over the years. 1994(ish) and 1977(ish) stick out in my mind. Anyone who says: "Oh, it's just a nasty flu" has never had a bad flu. I can't imagine being more sick than being stuck in bed for two solid weeks not wanting to move because it hurts so bad but you have to make yourself some food and then choke it down only to throw it up. And Covid-19 is WORSE THAT THAT! Holy hell, people, I'd do ANYTHING to avoid that.

jacquesm 7y ago
I had a couple of weeks paralysis as a result of a bad flue in my teens. Scary as hell.
- 1996 7y ago
  Guillan Barre syndrome (paralysis) can be seen after vaccines or viral infection
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    Yes, but that usually lasts a lot longer. My stepdad had that and nearly died from it. Spent a long time in a ventilator and the remainder of his life in a wheelchair.
  - navaati 7y ago
    Urgh, yet another auto-immune disease ? I really hope that a massive breakthrough in medical knowledge will happen regarding that general subject. Unfortunately the matter seems to be more complex than anything I, as a developer, can imagine…

onetimemanytime 7y ago

>>As far as I am aware... Doesn't really matter what you are aware or not. USA and the major countries have thousands of people that do just that, monitor epidemics. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-nCoV/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-nCoV/index.html That's their job and they have ways to notify leadership. Other look out for steroids, others for hackers hacking power plants, others look out for terror threats and so on. It turns out that out intel services knew about this and its potential since January but civilian leader more or less ignored it. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/us-intelligence-reports-from-january-and-february-warned-about-a-likely-pandemic/2020/03/20/299d8cda-6ad5-11ea-b5f1-a5a804158597_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/us-intellig...

jacquesm 7y ago
> It turns out that out intel services knew about this and its potential since January I would hope they knew about it since January because I knew about it since January and likely so did you. And since the beginning of February I've been warning people in ever more concrete terms. Here it was, right here on HN in January: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22146446 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22146446 There may be even older ones, for instance, this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22000761 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22000761 Which linked to: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-51047576 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-51047576 which in turn links to: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-50984025 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-50984025 Which is the oldest western article I've been able to find. Are there older ones?
- fragmede 7y ago
  On HN, the oldest I was able to find is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21926713 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21926713 linking to https://www.dw.com/en/china-investigates-sars-like-virus-as-dozens-struck-by-pneumonia/a-51843861 https://www.dw.com/en/china-investigates-sars-like-virus-as-... from Jan 1st, which is 8 days earlier than your second link, but with only 3 points and zero comments, I'm not sure how much that counts. The BBC story that you linked to is from Jan 3rd, the AP had a story[1] on the 5th, so the public had opportunity to know about it in early January. I can't get Reddit's search to cooperate, so I can't say if there's an earlier mention there (plus Google's dates about Reddit don't agree with Reddit's). Wikipedia has an early timeline page with a lot of details.[2] Public statements were made on December 30th about pneumonia of unknown cause. If there had been a US pandemic response team, we could have started mobilizing December 30th. Hong Kong did. [1] https://apnews.com/7cfe53b9e7c7509c1f61c6c09e6fc4e6 https://apnews.com/7cfe53b9e7c7509c1f61c6c09e6fc4e6 [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_2019%E2%80%9320_coronavirus_pandemic_in_November_2019_%E2%80%93_January_2020#17_November_2019 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_2019%E2%80%932...

ptero 7y ago

I am pretty sure H1N1 (aka swine flu) was declared a worldwide pandemic by the WHO.

toasterlovin 7y ago
Fatality rate similar to the normal flu.
- toasterlovin 7y ago
  In Case you think I’m making this up, here’s what I said elsewhere in this thread: > According to this Wikipedia page about the 2009 flu pandemic (which is what the term “swine flu” references, as best as I can tell), worldwide fatalities are estimated at 575 thousand (upper bound) and worldwide infections are estimated at 700 million (lower bound). Given those numbers, the worst case fatality rate is 0.08%. Then there is this quote: > A follow-up study done in September 2010 showed that the risk of serious illness resulting from the 2009 H1N1 flu was no higher than that of the yearly seasonal flu. > Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_flu_pandemic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_flu_pandemic reply
- Der_Einzige 7y ago
  Literally "just the flu bro"
- throw9o8765 7y ago
  At the time it was happening, no one knew that. The media was comparing it to SARS.
  - toasterlovin 7y ago
    Okay, but my original point is that nobody in the West has gone through something like what we’re going through. You’re actually making my point even stronger: not only has no one in the West ever actually lived through a pandemic that took a bunch of lives and requires societal level sacrifice, we’ve all had false alarms that have made us less likely to take potential pandemics seriously.

spodek 7y ago

Obesity, according to this NIH document https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28292617 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28292617 on Pubmed: > Obesity pandemic: causes, consequences, and solutions-but do we have the will? > Abstract > Obesity has become pandemic owing to an obesogenic environment (inexpensive calorie dense food, technologies and structure of communities that reduce or replace physical activity, and inexpensive nonphysical entertainment) and excessive emphasis on low fat intake resulting in excessive intake of simple carbohydrates and sugar. . .

toasterlovin 7y ago
Until we find an infectious cause of obesity, calling it an obesity pandemic is a rhetorical act it grounded in the widely accepted meaning of the word.
- burfog 7y ago
  Wikipedia's page on Adenoviridae lists these human adenovirus types that cause obesity or adipogenesis: HAdV-A type 31; HAdV-C type 5; HAdV-D types 9, 36, 37 One of the references: Voss JD, Atkinson RL, Dhurandhar NV (November 2015). "Role of adenoviruses in obesity". Reviews in Medical Virology. 25 (6): https://zenodo.org/record/1229348 https://zenodo.org/record/1229348 So yes, obesity can be caused by contagious disease.
  - toasterlovin 7y ago
    Obesity can be caused by a infectious disease is not the same thing as obesity, in general, being caused by an infectious disease. It would have to be caused by a contagious, in general, to be able to describe the widespread prevalence of obesity as a pandemic, since the term pandemic is concerned with infectious diseases.
- gindely 7y ago
  A pandemic is a form of epidemic (according to Wikipedia's definition, which you have referred to). An epidemic is an outbreak of a disease (according to Wikipedia's definition, which you have referred to). A disease is a particular abnormal condition that negatively affects the structure or function of all or part of an organism, and that is not due to any immediate external injury... A disease may be caused by external factors such as pathogens or by internal dysfunctions. (according to Wikipedia's definition, which is included by link by its definition of epidemic). There is no requirement on the definition of epidemic that you have referred to that requires it to be infectious. Please pick a definition and stick to it. You want a pandemic to be a global outbreak of a disease to which the overwhelming majority of the population is susceptible and which is spread via a pathogen without physical contact. If there's an authority that uses that definition, find them and cite them. Otherwise please stick the definitions you've already cited and move on.

bogomipz 7y ago

The HIV/AIDS pandemic, not only recent but also one of the most destructive in human history as well. [1] [1] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5531a1.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5531a1.htm

quickthrowman 7y ago
Please explain how a disease transmitted by unprotected sex and IV drug use (once the blood supply was screened) is in any way comparable to an airborne illness. It’s not, the vast majority of western society (hell, eastern too) has never been at risk of contracting HIV/AIDS. The vast majority are at risk of COVID-19. HIV/AIDS is technically a pandemic, but not one that affects all populations/demographics. Completely different.
- bogomipz 7y ago
  You do realize there was a time where HIV/AIDS wasn't at all understood right? HIV/AIDS is not "technically a pandemic" it is a pandemic period. Pandemic is a geographic relative term it does not need to to "affect all populations/demographics." That is not a qualification. That appears to be some something you made up. The role of epidemiology is the same whether something is a flu pandemic or some other disease. The reason Dr Deborah Birx is qualified in her current role is because of her research in the early days of the HIV/AIDs pandemic. Nobody is claiming she is not qualified because that wasn't a flu pandemic.
  - toasterlovin 7y ago
    From another reply of mine in this thread: > AIDS is not a pandemic. Pandemic requires epidemic, which requires rapid spread in a short period of time. AIDS has been slow. Calling it a pandemic is, IMO, motivated by politics (it mostly affects male homosexuals and sub-Saharan Africans). Ctrl-F for my discussion elsewhere in this thread.
    - bogomipz 7y ago
      So you're stating that AIDS was never an epidemic? Right. And that's based on your opinion I guess? Well there's actual facts too: "In late 1983, the global presence of the mysterious virus motivated European authorities and the WHO to classify the growing number of diagnoses as an epidemic. In addition to the outbreak in the U.S., patients with similar symptoms were documented in 15 European countries, 7 Latin American countries, Canada, Zaire, Haiti, Australia and Japan. Of particular concern was an outbreak in central Africa among heterosexual patients."[1] [1] https://www.publichealth.org/public-awareness/hiv-aids/origin-story/ https://www.publichealth.org/public-awareness/hiv-aids/origi...

nkohari 7y ago

It was barely 10 years ago. Between April 2009 and April 2010, H1N1 (swine flu) sickened 60.8M people in the US alone. [0] [0] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/2009-h1n1-pandemic.html https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/2009-h1n1-pandemi...