ShareThisSome experts believe that the devastating Spanish influenza epidemic began in 1918 in Kansas, when an Army private at Camp Funston caught a particularly contagious variant of swine flu.
There's little doubt that the movement of hundreds of thousands of troops in that final year of World War I helped spread and evolve a disease that killed more than 50 million people worldwide.
The military connection to a flu crisis cropped up again in 1976, when 230 soldiers at Fort Dix, N.J., came down with swine flu, and health officials warned of a pandemic to come. Turns out, just one of the 230 troops died, and the flu never developed into a mass threat.
This time, the Navy and Air Force are getting credit for being among the first to spot the current swine-flu outbreak. On April 16 -- five days before the public first learned about the flu surfacing in Mexico -- scientists at the Naval Health Research Center in San Diego spotted an unusual sample from a 10-year-old son of a service member, who was part of an ongoing influenza surveillance study.
The Navy dispatched the sample across the country to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which identified it as the current swine-flu strain. The child recovered.
Air Force doctors were also ahead of the curve when two 16-year-old sons of airmen at Randolph Air Force Base in Texas came to a clinic with the flu. They, too, forwarded the unusual samples to the CDC for confirmation of the first cases in the Lone Star State.
Four million Americans were admitted to hospitals in 2006 for treatment that could have been prevented with more timely and effective outpatient care, according to a new report by the feds' Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
That care cost $31 billion -- or about 10 percent of the nation's entire hospital tab. The major illnesses behind the admissions: congestive heart failure, bacterial pneumonia, asthma and other lung conditions, and diabetes.
Women in the federal government work force are fast closing the wage gap with their male colleagues.
In 1988, the gender pay gap -- the difference between men's and women's average salaries -- was 28 cents on the dollar, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office. In 1998, the gap dropped, with women behind by only 19 cents. In 2007, the most recent year for which data was available, the gap fell to 11 cents.
The GAO says the reason is that, more and more, women's educational background, years of experience and choice of jobs have come to mirror men's.
The workplace is turning far less favorable for immigrants -- legal and illegal -- in the United States, a new study of U.S. labor statistics shows.
Unemployment in the first quarter of 2009 for immigrants -- defined as those who were not U.S. citizens at birth -- was 9.7 percent, compared with 8.6 percent for the native-born, according to the study by the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that argues for tighter immigration policies.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows the states with the highest immigrant unemployment rates are Colorado, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona and Nevada.
A major reason for the higher unemployment is that immigrants tend to be in occupations hit hard by the recession, the study says.
A bumper crop of farmers markets has sprouted nationwide, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The department's Agricultural Marketing Service reported that it has counted 4,685 operating farmers markets around the country. That is more than triple the number found in 1994, when the service began tracking the markets.
The USDA credits an increasing appetite for fresh vegetables and unusual produce for part of the proliferation.
Years ago, someone with bad arthritis who couldn't retire might hope for a desk job. But that may not be such a good option in the computer age. A new study by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh finds that 84 percent of arthritis patients experience some problem with using a computer, and 77 percent say they have discomfort while at a mouse or keyboard.
A recent CDC survey found that more than 8.6 million Americans consider themselves disabled because of arthritis or rheumatism.
QUOTABLE:
"The audacity of a dope." -- Washington wag, upon learning Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has picked "Yes We Can" as his re-election campaign slogan.
(E-mail Lisa Hoffman at hoffmanl(at)shns.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)
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