Looking at this thread reminded me of something a family friend had told me. She said she had attended some kind of medical talk/lecture, and it was stated that approximately every 100 years, MAJOR epidemics tend to strike. The last major one was the Spanish Flu in 1918 and resulted in (correct me if I'm wrong, just too tired to double check my damn numbers this morning) 50,000 deaths. We are in 2012, almost a hundred years later... and hearing stories like this one really makes me nervous... Especially when you take the population of the world back then and compare it to the population as it is TODAY. Considering how much our population has grown in the past 100 years, if another major epidemic such as tb or another deadly flu hits us, doesn't that mean that the death toll would be much higher?
Yeah, I know I've been proven wrong before here, and if someone would like to prove me wrong again, please do so. Because the thought of being so close in time to a potential massive epidemic like that is mind-fuckingly terrifying to me.