After the Spanish flu, two other pandemics - the Asian flu in 1957 and the Hong Kong flu in 1968 - killed more than 1.5 million people. In the U.S., the 1957 Asian flu sickened over 50 percent of the country's school children and killed 69,800 people.²⁸

In 1976, a soldier in the Fort Dix, NJ army barracks died from a flu strain descended from the Spanish flu. Health authorities put together a massive vaccination campaign, but the virus did not spread beyond the military camp.²⁹

Even more alarming, in 1997 scientists documented the first viral infection from bird to man, which meant that there was no immunity to the newborn microbe anywhere. The virus appeared to be transmitted from infected poultry in Hong Kong. A three-year-old boy was the first of six fatalities; 12 more people were sickened. To stop infection, health officials in that city destroyed more than a million infected birds, and new cases of human infection ceased. The "chicken flu" did not spread beyond Hong Kong.³⁰