Friday 29 September 2017

How you could help stop a flu pandemic

How you could help stop a flu pandemic We seem to be suffering from a global amnesia. Ask any passerby - as we did - “What was the most catastrophic cause of death in the last 100 years?” and you receive the usual suspects: WWII, perhaps WWI. There are also some less obvious replies: Chernobyl, the Boxing Day Tsunami, Hiroshima. Very, very rarely will anyone say Spanish Flu, and yet that particular pandemic killed up to 100 million people.

There have been three others since then. Even more astonishing is that the UK Government considers another flu pandemic so dangerous to our society that it tops the list of the newly updated National Risk Register for Civil Emergencies.

So it’s particularly timely that the BBC has just launched the BBC Pandemic App on the iOS App Store and Google Play.

This free app is part of the biggest experiment of its kind, a citizen science experiment that aims to spread a virtual pandemic - an outbreak of a simulated infectious disease around the entire country. BBC News

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