Posted on 09/09/2018 9:42:57 AM PDT by NRx
Geez, Whatta beating Europe took over 3 decades.
My grandfather lost his first wife and kids from the Spanish flu in Dallas while he was at Love Field.
I supposed I wouldn’t have been born if he hadn’t?
“Always wondered if that flu was developed as a biological weapon by Germany...”
Doubtful. The science of microbiology was too primitive. Bacteria were known but there was no knowledge of viruses - none. If it couldn’t be seen with the very simple microscopes available at the time then no one knew about it. You need a scanning electron microscope to see a virus.
I heartily recommend “The Coming Plague” by Laurie Garratt, one of the few books that I have read twice, and will probably read again. Just looked in it- She says that entire Inuit villages were wiped out by the pandemic of 1918-1919. Almost all of Western Samoa caught it, and 7500 (20%) died from it.
My stepdad’s mother died when he was two, which would have been 1919. I have wondered if she caught that flu.
The “Spanish influenza” was an H1N1 type of virus. That is very similar to the 2009 pandemic, except that it was far more deadly. One of the issues was that no one had been exposed to an H1N1 type of virus before, so the immune response was exaggerated in many people. That caused the deadly cytokine storm that was responsible for taking so many lives.
Our main danger from a pandemic is, I think, another virus that no one has any immunity to. It could be a flu virus, or it could be another virus with similar transmission properties (transmitted through the respiratory tract, lives on surfaces for a few hours, etc.). We just don’t know. And our “advanced” health care system will be overwhelmed quickly, with what could be dozens or hundreds of patients showing up daily. Any given hospital only has a limited number of ICU beds... a larger but still limited number of regular ward beds... hospitals could exceed capacity fast. We could easily see a situation like they did in 1918, setting up school gymnasiums and other large buildings as wards.
It’s a very sobering topic to consider.
Medical science thought germ theory meant epidemics were a thing of the past. They did not know about viruses at the time and this epidemic is what caused researchers to discover viruses.
I care more about Fungi...
My grandfather died from that horrible deadly flu, a healthy farmer, age 32. That death affected lives into 2 more generations. How different it would have been if he had lived. They didn’t have the meds to fight it then.
And it is even easier to spread today.
The best source (ground zero for the flu) is an American training camp near swine herds (swine flue link is credible as a mutation), is central Kansas months earlier than Nov 1918. Spread through US soldiers to the east coast US, overseas, then through Europe (and of course the UK’s) civilian populations.
Well, actually, we don’t have the medicines to fight it now either.
We know the treatments, and the medicines to help fight it most certainly. But we don’t have ENOUGH of either to fight FOR ENOUGH of the victims to stop such a plague until it (once again) naturally transmutes itself to another, less fatal version. 200 million, 400 million victims going to the ICU?
A wise course of action.
In an era before antibiotics and vaccines, the “Spanish influenza”
– so-called because neutral Spain was one of the few countries in 1918 where correspondents were free to report on the outbreak
– claimed the lives of nearly 250,000 Britons.
The original sourced news article includes information about the increased death rate in European nations.
To some nations, it was devastating, impacting military and common citizens alike;
however, due to war conditions, the health impact on military and civilian populations could not be disclosed by the media.
There’s an “X-Files” episode in all of this I believe.....I want to believe.
No, modern medicine would quickly run out of ventilators. Ibe read there’s something like 100-150,000 beds/ventilators available. We would save a few more, but not like what you are thinking.
Lost more Dough Boys during WW1 to Spanish Flu than to combat deaths.
Thanks Robert A Cook PE. There have been annual flu epidemics every year for a good long time, with major upticks in mortality here and there throughout the 19th century, particularly in the second half of the 19th. One of the last 19th century killer flus apparently had something in common with the Spanish Lady (which started in 1916, peaked in 1918, and finaled in 1920), as those who'd had the earlier strain didn't even get a runny nose during the 1918.
One hundred years ago this month, just as the first world war was drawing to a fitful close, an influenza virus unlike any before or since swept across the British Isles, felling soldiers and civilians alike...
see my earlier post. In short, uh, no.
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