[VOA]

“
Survivors of 1918 Flu Pandemic Immune 90 Years Later
“

Funny (ironic funny) that this reminds me of my father’s beloved
Aunt Olive.
As a child, I recall her memory of “The Spanish Influenza”.
She talked about the amazing number of people that “when they woke
up...they was dead!”.

Even these three and more decades later, I marvel at how an humble old
“flyover-country” lady told me almost as much about the global pandemic
now known as “The Spanish Influenza” as I learned in an excellent
(even if it’s from PBS!!!) documentary; the webpage for the doc is
linked below)

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/previous_seasons/case_killerflu/index.html

PS: As much as it pains me...”Secrets of The Dead” is one of the
few jewels of PBS...it’s just about as much of a truth-telling and
politically-incorrect series as PBS has ever produced.
OK, IMHO!!!

PPS and additional irony:
The narrator of “Secrets of The Dead” (Liev Schreiber, sp?) filled
in for for top dog “Grissom” for a couple of episodes of “CSI”.

[Yaelle]

AND, Liev Shreiber is a known conservative!

[Caramelgal]

…”Secrets of The Dead” is one of the few jewels of PBS...it’s just about as much of a truth-telling and politically-incorrect series as PBS has ever produced.

”Secrets of The Dead” was a very good series. I wish they would do more of them. I think NOVA also did a program on this as well, but it was more about the graves of some service men who died from the 1918 flu who were buried in Alaska and the scientist who were trying to find out if they could extract a live virus from their bodies in order to learn more about the virus and why it killed so many so quickly.

But there was other PBS program on this topic that was also very good: “The American Experience – Influenza 1918”, narrated by David McCullough.

The American Experience

Using news paper stories, personal letters, photographs and first person interviews of survivors, it told the story from a very human perspective. I never realized how bad it had been in some cites and how many people had died over such a short time.

[djf]

I’ve read half a dozen or so narratives about how it happened.

It was not at all unusual to wake up in the morning, and appear to be totally healthful and uninfected, and to be dead by nightfall.

Scary stuff. Seriously, Night of the Living Dead seriously scary stuff.

And of course the eggheads, in their determination to do something new and exciting no matter how dangerous, have thawed and resurrected the virus from corpses in far northern climes where they were frozen.

Thanks a lot, idjits!