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Inside NASA's astronaut bootcamp and the grueling new training regimen for deep space. Plus, ten young geniuses shaking up science today, one writer's quest to analyze every man-made chemical in her body and more.
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To be fair, the Spanish flu really spread that badly because of World War 1. It's actually supposed to be the French or German flu, but those countries had a media black-out during the war. Spain didn't and when the flu spread to there, Spain was the first country to report on it in a major capacity. But the real breeding ground were the incredibly unhygienic and close-quarter environments of the WW1 trenches.
Not that Avian flu wouldn't spread wildly today, but I don't think a comparison with the 1918 epidemic is entirely accurate.
There is some speculation that the mutation that made the 1918 flu so deadly occurred in Kansas. We'll likely never know.
Actually, the real breeding grounds were the troop transport ships and crowded conditions in the cities of both Europe and the USA.