New York Times: The Next Flu Pandemic Will Appear When You Least Expect It
“If a new flu pandemic emerges, it may be easy to spot. The epidemic is most likely to appear in spring or summer, researchers have found — not in the midwinter depths of the flu season. … A half-dozen flu pandemics — including those of 1889, 1918 (the Spanish flu), 1957, 1968, and 2009 (the swine flu) — were all first detected between late March and late July, according to a study published recently in PLOS Computational Biology by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin and the Institute for Disease Modeling in Bellevue, Wash…” (McNeil, 12/8).