Letters from the December 9, 2006, issue of Science News
By Science News
War is not the answer
“U.S. Population to surpass 300 million” (SN: 10/7/06, p. 238) concludes with the interesting fact that the only annual drop in U.S. population during the past century “occurred between July 1917 and July 1918, when the country was at war,” implying a military cause for the decline. Indeed, the honored dead of the First World War did total 116,708. However, you missed the far-more-serious cause of death responsible for the population anomaly: the great influenza, which killed 675,000 Americans, mostly in 1918.