40,000 contract serious virus in Ukraine, kills 30 Not Swine Flu

[Jan Klimkowski]

The key element to look for is mortality rates of healthy 20-45-year-olds.

This group should only die from "regular" flu on exceptionally rare occasions.

If healthy 20-45-year-olds start dying in statistically meaningful numbers, then we are probably looking at a cytokine storm, where the body's own defence mechanism rampages out of control and attacks the host. Ie us.

Cytokine storm is how "Spanish" flu killed so many young people in 1918.

The unusually severe disease killed between 2 and 20% of those infected, as opposed to the more usual flu epidemic mortality rate of 0.1%.[10][13] Another unusual feature of this pandemic was that it mostly killed young adults, with 99% of pandemic influenza deaths occurring in people under 65, and more than half in young adults 20 to 40 years old.[25] This is unusual since influenza is normally most deadly to the very young (under age 2) and the very old (over age 70)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu

Fwiw - wiki here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cytokine_storm