Reddit reviews The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History

Ok, I know that there have been government plans for mass arrest, such as by the Reagan Administration in response to mass protests against U.S. action in Latin America.

So I don't exactly dismiss these theories. However, I do think the CDC and FEMA have a legitimate role in preparing for national emergencies, such as a pandemic.

Major pandemics have happened in the past, and will undoubtedly naturally occur in the future, and like Katrina, we'll be pretty pissed if the government isn't prepared for them.

I recently read The Great Influenza, which I recommend, and the author argued that, if anything, the conspiracy was in ignoring the problem, because the government thought it would cut into war preparation, and allowing the disease to spread from an army base out to the wider population.

So, if FEMA and CDC are going to be prepared for a repeat, they need to be ready to quarantine large areas quickly and completely, as well as prepare for large numbers of bodies. During the 1917 pandemic, there were so many bodies, people often lived for days or weeks with dead bodies in their houses, because there was no one to bury them and cemeteries were overwhelmed.

So they'll need large numbers of caskets and crematoria ready. And, again, we'll all be angry if they're no adequately prepared for this. But they stockpile these things, and everyone freaks out. Sounds to me like a bit of a Catch-22.

What do you think?

tl;dr: we expect CDC and FEMA to be prepared for large numbers of civilian deaths in their normal roles, and criticize them when they aren't. Yet, we freak out when they do take measures to prepare.

In severe cases of influenza that happens too. In the flu epidemic in 1918 a lot of people died from internal injuries from coughing so much and so violently. Here's a cool book on the flu epidemic actually: The Great Influenza Nasty, nasty way to die.

I really shouldn't have read The Great Influenza right before flu season. Now I'm just going to be paranoid.

Actually, you have to take large quantities. Reportedly, there are different kinds of colloidal silver, one using Colloidal Silver Protein that can bind to your tissues, but another kind that can't (or can't as easily), but I don't have the chemistry to say if that's true or not. Other people say the problem is Silver Nitrate.

Silver's antibiotic effect is supposed to be due to interfering with the target's ability to breathe. Essentially suffocating it.

Silver was widely used as an antibiotic until antibiotics were introduced during the flu pandemic of 1918. Mortality rates skyrocketed. The details are covered in The Great Influenza, which is an excellent read.

A few that came to mind:
The Great Influenza
Autism's False Prophets
1776
The Greatest Show On Earth
Ghost Wars
The Demon-Haunted World

"The Great Influenza" by John Barry is an excellent book on the subject.

Interesting note: It was a world-wide Pandemic that didn't even start in Spain. Spain was neutral during World War I and didn't censor the news. Other newspapers were able link the news coming out of Spain with the disease in their own countries.

For a great read on influenza in general and the H5N1 virus in particular, see http://www.amazon.com/Great-Influenza-Deadliest-Plague-History/dp/0670894737.