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Originally Posted by justinrazs
but.. i said nothing about those diseases, our bodies have evolved a lot since being chimps, making us immune to most disease...
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That statement is terribly inaccurate....
If we were immune to most disease, we'd only have a couple of diseases out there that affect humans. That, unfortunately, is not the case. I agree that there certainly are diseases in the past that we can cure now, but there are many diseases from the past that simply went away due to the ridiculously high mortality rate of them. It's difficult to spread a disease when everything it infects is dead. Nowadays, the threat of an epidemic or pandemic are much greater simply because of how often people travel. If there is a small incubation period, the disease could potentially get cross continent and begin infection there as well, not to mention how quickly one can now move from city to city.
Here's a couple snippets of a very interesting
article that shows that the bird flu may have been responsible for nearly 50 million deaths in 1918.
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Scientists who resurrected the 1918 "Spanish flu" virus that killed as many as 50 million people ...
"We felt we had to recreate the virus and run these experiments to understand the biological properties that made the 1918 virus so exceptionally deadly...
Taubenberger's team used pieces of virus taken from preserved samples from 1918 victims, as well as from the corpse of a victim dug up from a frozen grave in Alaska in 1998...
The experiment, in which the virus was recreated employing a process called reverse genetics using preserved samples of the 1918 virus, allowed the researchers to test it in the laboratory and in several animals...
"We now think that the best interpretation of the data available to us is that the 1918 virus was an entirely avian-like virus that adapted to humans," ...
They also said there was no danger to the public from their experiments, which are conducted in biosafety level 3 labs designed to contain the virus...
[If not the bird flu] then some other influenza virus is certain to cause a pandemic that could be much worse than the 1918 flu, Gerberding said. "Most experts agree it is not a question of if -- it is a question of when," she said
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