Influenza pandemics are global epidemics resulting from new variants of the influenza virus emerging in global populations. For this to happen, the virus must spread easily from person to person and cause serious illness in the human body. Major pandemic outbreaks have been recorded for over a hundred years. Advances in medical knowledge have helped doctors and scientists understand how these outbreaks occur and develop plans to prevent and treat the virus. Before current knowledge about the flu, people could do nothing to control outbreaks. If we compare strategies implemented during an outbreak that predated modern medical developments to a more recent pandemic, the evidence demonstrates that we were better prepared to manage the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic than we were to deal with it. to the 1918 flu pandemic. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay During the two years of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, more than 50 million people died. The virus appeared in two waves, the first being much less deadly than the second. Scientists are still unable to identify the specific strain of influenza A that was infecting the population at that time. So it's hard to understand why she was so deadly. When the flu first emerged, the United States was ill-equipped to deal with a health crisis. Doctors, nurses, and supplies were being sent overseas because World War I was still underway at the time of the initial outbreak. The country was well equipped to fight in Europe, but was not prepared to fight disease on the home front. It was up to local governments to decide how to contain outbreaks, and many communities initiated different types of containment plans. Some cities had plans in place, but most lacked the resources to implement them effectively. Many cities have chosen to close public places and force quarantine of households housing infected people until they are cured. This measure was ineffective because it was almost impossible to enforce. Gauze masks were distributed and health laws were put in place in an effort to prevent the spread of the virus from person to person. Scientists attempted to take preventative measures by creating vaccines, but these proved ineffective because they were not made with the virus itself. In 1918, there was little understanding of how to make effective vaccines. Antiviral drugs had not yet been formulated at the time, so there was little doctors could do for a patient once they were infected (Ott 803-810). Current epidemics are nowhere near as deadly as those in the early 1900s. In early 2009, a new influenza A (H1N1) virus appeared in the human population. This virus spread rapidly through direct human-to-human contact, resulting in a pandemic of the virus. 18,449 laboratory-confirmed deaths were recorded as a direct result of the outbreak. This is significantly less than the 50 million deaths that occurred during the 1918 flu epidemic. Each country developed slightly different, but effective, control strategies when the epidemic struck in early 2009. Scientists were able to develop vaccines much faster than ever before to target the specific strain of the virus. The countries that launched the,.