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Originally Posted by octothorp
And just what do you base that assumption on? The last global pandemic (Spanish Influenza, 1919) was followed by a decade of unprecedented economic growth. I'm not suggesting that the economic prosperity was because of the pandemic. The cold reality is that death on a massive scale doesn't always hurt the economy as much is often assumed. I remember reading one estimate that the global economy can sustain a 1% hit (that's 60 million deaths) from a pandemic without really taking much of a setback. That's roughly double the death-toll from the Spanish Influenza, and a more than a hundred times the death-toll of the Asian Influenza and the Hong Kong Influenza combined.
I'm a believer that the best thing we can do right now is a policy such as that currently being undertaken in Vietnam: inoculation of all poultry against the virus. It's expensive and logistically complex. But it makes so much more sense to try to control this virus in livestock than to wait until it jumps to humans, then control it there.
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Maybe world war one had something to due with the economic growth just like WWII had. I can guarantee you the spanish flu didnt create the growth.