H1N1

Flu season in the Southern Hemisphere is almost over—and now it’s heading back our way. At the time this issue went to press, there were more than 162,000 confirmed cases and 1,154 deaths worldwide from “novel H1N1,” a.k.a. swine flu, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention believes this figure is a gross underestimate, especially since only a fraction of people who have the flu go to the hospital.

You may have seen circulating around the Web these cheesy, scaremongering PSA’s, which were on every TV in the nation in 1976. US health officials meant well--after an H1N1 outbreak at an Army Base in Fort Dix, New Jersey, they were worried about a pandemic potentially as dangerous as the 1918 flu outbreak--but in hindsight, the widespread, nationwide immunization program created plenty of problems of its own far outweighing the spread of the flu. Given today's news that the WHO has declared H1N1 a global pandemic, it's good to remember that in some ways, we've been through this before.