[Billthedrill]

This is precisely the same pattern found in the great influenza epidemic following World War One. It was especially cruel since many who had survived the horrors of the trenches succumbed to a virus after their return home.

This occurs because older people have been, through their lives, challenged by enough different varieties of virii to have built up a partial immunity to something just similar enough to help. Also, younger adults are more physically active and hence exposed to a wider variety of disease agents. Add international travel to the mix - as it was in 1919, it is much more so now - and you have a pandemic if you're not careful.

[aristeides]

The Spanish flu of 1918 killed a lot of people in their teens and twenties. The people who just died of SARS were aged 37 to 52, I believe. Not old, certainly, but more accurately described as middle-aged than young, unlike many of the victims of the Spanish flu.