[majos]

The estimates in that first article seem oddly cavalier:

> “Around 40 million people died in 1918 Spanish flu outbreak," said Prof [of mathematical biology at ICL] Ferguson. "There are six times more people on the planet now so you could scale it up to around 200 million people probably."

As of 2014 the number of deaths is <500, although the Wikipedia article [1] is written as if bird flu is something that may yet turn much worse.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_A_virus_subtype_H5...