Of all the memes I've encountered since "meme" became a thing, this may be the most dangerous. I first heard this "every election year there's a disease" list in the convo w/ the HCW I tweeted about the other day. I've seen a variant on this five times since. 
This idea that every election year the media hypes some plague is circulating among the most vulnerable -- the elderly, those with no cash cushion or ability to take off of work or get childcare, the asthmatic, the survivors of a "healthcare" system that has priced them out.
Probably the saddest thing about this meme is that the dates are wrong. SARS was 2002-03. Swine flu was 2009. Zika? It's not an outbreak -- it mosquito-borne illness! The people circulating this foolishness won't even Google it. They don't even want to know. My heart breaks.
This is a desperate fairy tale circulated mainly by those who don't have the resources to prep for or handle what's next, & they know it. For most who repeat this, the alternative to believing it is despair. It wrecks me to see who's sharing this on my FB feed & repeating it IRL.
(Ok, it's fine to call Zika an outbreak... but it started in 2015, not 2016.)
