[xJones]

I understand what you're saying, and history is replete with pandemics that spring up all at once. China has an a LONG history of periodic epidemics that have in some ancient accounts, killed 50% of the population at that time. The Black Death originated in Asia and destroyed an estimated 30% of Europe. It took Europe about 100 years to get back to their pre-plague populations. And that was all dear old mother nature.

[_Jim]

The Black Death originated in

VERY few diseases have reached the 'panic' level in our press as quickly as SARS has - yet there are diseases that have killed as many people (although over a little longer time period) even relatively recently - - even the plague is still with us -

- from:

The World Health Organization (WHO) Weekly Epidemiological Record (WER)

17 April 2003, Vol78, 16 (pp129-136)

Human plague in 2000 and 2001

The total number of human plague cases reported to WHO in 2000 by 11 countries was 2513, of which 232 were fatal.

In 2001, 12 countries reported 2671 cases including 175 deaths.

These figures are comparable with the annual average figures (2821 cases, 198 deaths) for the previous 10 years (1990ñ1999), when 28 207 plague cases with 1978 deaths were reported from 24 countries. During this past decade, 80.3% of cases and 83.9% of deaths were reported from Africa.

In 2000 and 2001, global case-fatality rates (CFRs) were 9.2% and 6.6% respectively, as compared with 8.5% in 1998 and 8.1% in 1999, and an average of 7.0% per year in the previous decade (1990ñ1999).