Haiti earthquake
 

Sad when this happens anywhere in the world, and when the death toll is at a whopping 100,000 you can just hope the country and victims find a way through it.

Sadly it's hit a very poor area, which won't make things easier. I hope they get good enough relief from countries around the world.

This is an interesting table I saw on Wiki the other day actually.

http://img696.imageshack.us/img696/516/87569106.jpg

I for one had no idea about the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic that left 50 to 100 million people dead (3% of the worlds population at the time). Death on that sort of scale is beyond even trying to comprehend. You would think that considering the worlds deadliest natural disaster thats on record only happened less than a century ago, more people would know about it. Never heard a teacher mention it at school or uni.

Re: Haiti earthquake
 

Rather a sad indictment of current schools. Cannot remember where or when I learnt of the Spanish flu pandemic, but was a long time ago, probably secondary school. Perhaps those bald figures will make people realise why 'they' are so worried about another pandemic and the 'scaremongering' regarding Bird flu and Swine flu is in fact based on genuine concerns.

The one that I find pretty staggering is the 25 million killed by a drought and famine in India over just two years! Had not heard of that, so might look into it.

Re: Haiti earthquake
 

<muse>

How many men have been killed by the hands of other men, in wars, genocide, murder?

One, two hundred million in the last century?

Seems the human race itself is fairly good at thinning out it's own numbers with no help from mother nature...

</muse>

Re: Haiti earthquake
 

Yeh, and whats worse is that the Spanish Flu Pandemic which killed more people than all deaths in WW2 was made worse by the fact their was a war.

It was said that conditions of war favoured an outbreak. In normal life, when you have a real bad virus you stay at home, which doesn't favour that virus spreading. In war, the mildly ill had to fight on, whilst the real ill people were shipped away from the frontline and taken into care. This involved the very ill soldiers getting on trains, going to public areas, etc, in the process allowing the worse strains to spread further.

So I guess that's humans contribution to the worst ever recorded natural disaster.

Re: Haiti earthquake
 

its was just after ww1, if i recall my dates correctly.