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Squawking Hysteria?
Instapundit linked up some heartening words of calm about the latest chicken-little-ism over avian flu. People sometimes seem to forget just how backward medical practices and technologies were eighty years ago. We simply don't die of those things any more, and for good reasons that won't change with the sudden appearance of a new sort of flu.
I've been saying much the same - just didn't have the specifics that this guy brings to the table. If people don't realize the differences in sanitation, medical knowledge, communications, population density, and the like, and then try to extrapolate the 1918 or any other epidemic, their analyses are flawed from the get-go (bad assumptions generally equal incorrect results). Hell, even current epidemics in many other countries can't be used to figure what would happen in ours, just due to the differences in the factors that still exist.