"collision of science and epidemic disease"

Every day I make sure to read anything written by Oregon Muse in the Ace of Spades blog. Here is a small glimpse of his writing today.

I was surprised to learn, some years back, that the 1918 flu epidemic was the worst plague in history, even more so than the bubonic plague(s) that decimated Europe during the medieval era.

At the height of World War I, history’s most lethal influenza virus erupted in an army camp in Kansas, moved east with American troops, then exploded, killing as many as 100 million people worldwide. It killed more people in twenty-four months than AIDS killed in twenty-four years, more in a year than the Black Death killed in a century. But this was not the Middle Ages, and 1918 marked the first collision of science and epidemic disease.
The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History by John Barry is $13.99 on Kindle, about what the paperback edition costs.

Here's perhaps a portent of things to come, namely, the time San Francisco narrowly avoided an outbeak of bubonic plague.

The plague first sailed into San Francisco on the steamer Australia, on the day after New Year’s in 1900. Though the ship passed inspection, some of her stowaways—infected rats—escaped detection and made their way into the city’s sewer system. Two months later, the first human case of bubonic plague surfaced in Chinatown.
The Barbary Plague: The Black Death in Victorian San Francisco is the account of one of the great, if little known, triumphs in American public health history.

I'm dreading the day that some feces-born disease breaks out in San Francisco and it can't be contained because of a bunch of 'woke' fights breaking out. People will be dying while city officials bicker over why a transgender lesbian midget wasn't put on the public health task force.