top of the food chain

I am always surprised by the number of people I know who won't get a flu shot. (Not counting this years vaccine issues.)

I had a friend who was in the army in 1918, he had some first hand experience with the Spanish Flu.

First of all you should know something about this flu. It picked the healthy adults not the weak elderly or the undeveloped children. It killed 200,000 Americans in October 1918 alone.
It killed 675,000 Americans altogether and up to 30,000,000 (30 millions) worldwide.

Here is an account of the illness by Isaac Starr, 3rd year medical student, University of Pennsylvania, 1918.
"As their lungs filled … the patients became short of breath and increasingly cyanotic. After gasping for several hours they became delirious and incontinent, and many died struggling to clear their airways of a blood-tinged froth that sometimes gushed from their nose and mouth. It was a dreadful business."

My friend, serving as a messenger rider in the Army, was given the grim assignment of tagging the dead bodies of fellow soldiers who had died of the Flu. He went to the building where the bodies were awaiting shipment back home for burial. There he found so many that they were actually stacked on top of each other. He began the grim task of trying to identify the poor boys but made little progress. After hours of work he had managed to tag just a few, many of the bodies were so disfigured by the disease that he could not identify them. He then decided to get the job done so he just tagged each body with a name on his list. Something like this probably happened in Army camps and in hospitals all around the country.

We often think of ourselves as being on top of the food chain. We aren't. Viruses are on top of the food chain and they have no instinct for survival, they reproduce, they mutate, and they don't worry about killing the host.

'Flu' comes every year but it isn't just the flu, it is a number of new variants of the flu, and they are different every year and someday it will be a monster like the Spanish Flu and it will kill millions of people.

And it will kill someone reading this now.