| I would like to quote the following passage from "Cannibalism and The Common Law".
"From the province of Yunnan in China, and ultimately from its reservoir in Central Asia, bubonic plague reached Hong Kong in May of 1894, and in the following years of third pandemic, which killed 13 million people, it was carried by ships to all the major seaports of the world."
One lesson I learned from this is that the first wave of pandemic may not have killed too many people. The most lethal one is the following waves. The US promise to spend close to 1 billion on developing the vaccine largely because this worry. The second lesson is globalization strengthen the effectiveness of communicative disease. Before it was by ship, now it is by airplanes.
-- XinpingZhu - 24 May 2009 |