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[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

> >In a normal year, influenza kills thousands, like you say, mostly the
> elderly and the infirmed. 

I know the scare is that this strain of flue will come back in a deadly 
form ... fortunately the odds are against it .... but so far this strain of 
Swine Flu has only killed the very infirmed and those with very compromised 
immune systems and generally weakened physiques.   As a flu strain, so far, 
it 
isn't very deadly at all.

My grandmother had the Spanish Flu in 1918 and was very ill from it.  
There's an old stainless steel 3 gal milk bucket on the table there that I 
got 
from my grandfather's effects because it was the bucket he used to send with 
me to the spring to get the best drinking water.  This bucket with a drinking 
ladel sat on a table on the enclosed back porch of their house where it was 
the coolest.  Many times my grandmother would take a long drink from that 
cool spring water, pause, and take another long drink .... then she slip into 
a rememberance and say that never once in the fifty years since she had the 
Spanish Flu did she ever take a drink of water for granted.

You see, it wasn't the flu per se that killed so many young people.  Rather 
the flu weakened them to the point that any opportunistic bacterial disease 
could not be resisted, this being years before effective antibiotics.  The 
most common was the 'Captain of the Hosts of Death', pneumonia.  Doctors of 
the time observed patients' lungs filling with fluid and reasoned that if 
they didn't have water to drink, their lungs couldn't fill with fluid.  So 
the 
standard treatment was that in the throws of very high fever from influenza 
the patient was denied any water.

My grandmother was a rock.  She survived the dehydration.  So many of her 
contemporaries were not so lucky and died of kidney failure and dehydration 
from the standard medical treatment of the day (my, how things have NOT 
changed).

But it left her with the permanent memory of the torture of many days of 
thirst with a high fever but no water to drink.

Influenza is a serious thing, but the high death toll in 1918 and 1919 
wasn't entirely due to the potentcy of that particular strain of flu.


James