Fluoride in our drinking water is unhealthy.

Vaccinations cause disease in children.

The international communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.

Hairy palms, or go blind.

Legionnaires Disease in Philly in the late 70's.

Here is a novel one:

The New England vampire panic was the reaction to an outbreak of tuberculosis in the 19th century throughout Rhode Island, eastern Connecticut, Vermont, and other parts of New England. Consumption (tuberculosis) was thought to be caused by the deceased consuming the life of their surviving relatives.

quote:

Originally posted by sigmonkey:
I think I had the Spanish Fly once.

lololololololololololol

Polio and the use of iron lung in 1950s.

I am posting the first paragraph of this study along with the link if interested. Article from 6 years ago.

Mass Media and the Contagion of Fear: The Case of Ebola in America

In the weeks following the first imported case of Ebola in the U. S. on September 29, 2014, coverage of the very limited outbreak dominated the news media, in a manner quite disproportionate to the actual threat to national public health; by the end of October, 2014, there were only four laboratory confirmed cases of Ebola in the entire nation. Public interest in these events was high, as reflected in the millions of Ebola-related Internet searches and tweets performed in the month following the first confirmed case. Use of trending Internet searches and tweets has been proposed in the past for real-time prediction of outbreaks (a field referred to as “digital epidemiology”), but accounting for the biases of public panic has been problematic. In the case of the limited U. S. Ebola outbreak, we know that the Ebola-related searches and tweets originating the U. S. during the outbreak were due only to public interest or panic, providing an unprecedented means to determine how these dynamics affect such data, and how news media may be driving these trends.

LINK: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4465830/

Wasn't a health panic per se, but nuclear war/fallout. I'm not old enough to have gone through the school drills...

In the early 70's they were predicting global famine in the 2000's because they thought population growth would greatly surpass the ability to produce food.

Movies like Logan's Run, Rollerball, and Soylent Green reflected a Malthusian future of overpopulation, scarcity, and climate change.

quote:

Originally posted by wcb6092:
The Spanish Flu of 1918.

Pretty sure that one was a pandemic, not a panic, but I guess panicking about 50,000,000 dead may be warranted.

quote:

Originally posted by 2BobTanner:
Polio and the use of iron lung in 1950s.

Now THAT was something I was truthfully terrified of as a kid ...

Now it’s armadillos migrating North into Tennessee carrying leprosy...loosing sleep over this one

^^^^^^^
Yeah. I remember it well. I could never figure out why the kids were smiling. Here is an article that discussses it with pics.

What America Looked Like: Polio Children Paralyzed in Iron Lungs


It's 1955, and let's say the young boy pictured below made the mistake of drinking out of an unclean glass, or shook the hand of another boy who did not wash after using the toilet. Unknowingly, he exposed himself to poliomyelitis, the virus that causes polio.


The infection set in slowly. At first, it probably felt like a cold with fever, congestion, and achy joints. But maybe a week later, the boy's legs started to give out from under him, and his fever spiked above 100. The virus that first settled in the intestines had multiplied thousands-fold and moved on to attack its prized target -- his nervous system. The infection overtook crucial nerves of his respiratory system and the boy lost his ability to breathe on his own.


At its peak in 1952, more than 21,000 Americans contracted a paralyzing form of polio, and 3,000 died from it. Once infected, there was no treatment besides time and tending to the symptoms.

Unable to breathe, patients entered iron lungs, which made use of negative pressure ventilation -- a continual displacing and replacing the air inside of the machine -- to compress and depress the chest, simulating respiration. Although the patient could breathe in the machine, he could do little else besides look up at a mirror reflecting the room behind him (upside-down and backwards, of course). Typically, the children would spend two weeks inside while recovering. A 1930 Popular Mechanics article explains how the patient enters the iron lung in terms that sound more medieval than medical.
A metal chamber, with a sliding base upon which the patient is place, an electrically operated pump, a gauge and a valve are the chief parts of the outfit. The patient is placed on the sliding bed, shoved into the cabinet and the shield tightly locked. A rubber collar, which fits so snugly that almost no air can pass, is adjusted about the patient's neck. A switch is turned, and the cabinet begins its work.
Despite this highly restrictive environment -- and only being able to speak when the machine exhales for him -- the boy maintains his cheer, smiling for the camera man via the machine's mirror. And he's hardly alone. Herman Kiefer Hospital in Detroit holds dozens of children, all convalescencing in the iron lung.
NCP 4149-3_lg.jpg
National Museum of Health and Medicine


LINK: {Has the pics}

https://www.theatlantic.com/na...n-iron-lungs/251098/