Deadly Flu Outbreak: Is History Repeating Itself? [23,000 victims in Madagascar]

An out-of-control outbreak of influenza which has killed as many as 700 people and felled almost 23,000 victims is ravaging Madagascar and health authorities fear that if the disease is not confined to the huge island it could spread around the world.

Madagascar which is larger than France and has a population of 16 million people is located off southeast Africa. World Health Organization (WHO) officials have said that samples taken from victims of the illness have shown it to be Type A influenza, a strain of flu believed to have devastated the world in the horrendous 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic that killed more than 21 million people, a half-million in the U.S. alone.

In the latest outbreak the illness has swept across five out of the island's six provinces which is larger than France - since it first appeared in June, hitting malnourished villagers the hardest.

"The province of Antananarivo has also been affected by the severe flu, which has hit other regions in Madagascar since June, killing more than 700 people as of Monday," Samuel Andriamparany, a top government health official, told reporters.

Health officials say the illness - known as "raporapo" on the island - claims 95 percent of its victims from among impoverished peasants with no access to modern medical care. The infectious illness causes severe headaches, followed by neck and chest pains.

WHO spokesman Ian Simpson told reporters that a team of international health specialists is working closely with the Madagascar government in an effort to contain the disease and prevent its spread. He says the international and government experts have set up mobile health teams to respond to reports of large numbers of new cases in new places.

"They are able to send the mobile team out to help people to understand what is happening, to also help treat people where necessary," he said. "Particularly if they have secondary infections, which are what people are actually killed by. Those who are particularly elderly, have low immunity, or the very young are at risk of death from secondary infections. And the key is to get the right drugs to them at the right time and that can now be done."

Ominously, Dr. Patricia Doyle who has been tracking the epidemic told NewsMax.com that "Spanish flu comes to mind in this case ... it is spreading wildly and people are dying.... If this bug gets off the island, and hits Asia, the U.K., Europe, U.S. etc., the death toll will be staggering."

As already noted, in 1918-19 it was. What follows is a brief history of that terrifying epidemic.

It was still dark when Mess Sgt. Albert Gitchell woke up. He felt terrible, and the thought of making breakfast for hundreds of hungry soldiers at Fort Reilly's Camp Funston in the pre-dawn hours made him feel even worse.

He hadn't slept well. He'd gone to bed feeling miserable. He thought he was coming down with a cold and hoped a good night's sleep would make him feel better. It hadn't.

After a night of tossing and turning, he felt worse than he had the night before. His head throbbed, he was burning with fever, he had the mother of all sore throats and every muscle in his body ached.

He wouldn't be cooking breakfast for anybody this Monday morning, Gitchell thought, as he struggled out of his bunk and put on his fatigues. His tortured muscles protested every movement. His head pounded every time he took a step. He felt as if he hadn't slept in a week, and his body was on fire.

Without stopping to shave or shower, he left his barracks on this damp cold March morning headed for the camp hospital - and walked into the pages of medical history.

At Hospital Building 91, part of a sprawling army medical complex that predated the Spanish American War, the duty sergeant took Gitchell's temperature, noted it was an alpine 103 degrees, listened to the cook describe his symptoms, and, as a precaution, ordered him to bed in the ward reserved for men suffering from any ailment that might prove contagious.

With Gitchell out of the way, the medic turned his attention to Cpl. Lee W. Drake, the next man in line. Drake, a truck driver assigned to the Headquarters Transportation Detachment's First Battalion reported the same symptoms Gitchell described. The duty medic sent him to the same ward.

Right behind Drake came Sgt. Adolph Hurby. He was coughing, and his temperature was sky-high. His complaints echoed those of the two previous soldiers. His temperature hovered around 104 degrees, his pulse was low, he was drowsy, and he winced with pain every time his eyes were exposed to bright light. His throat, nasal passages and bronchial tubes were inflamed and badly congested with mucous. He was one sick soldier.

The medic was alarmed. Three men with identical symptoms arriving at the hospital within minutes of each other spelled trouble on any military base. But on a base jam-packed with 26,000 men it could mean disaster. The last thing anyone on this huge army base wanted in these waning days of World War I was an outbreak of contagious disease, and here was a clear warning that something very unpleasant might be loose and rapidly spreading. It was more than the harried medic could deal with. He picked up the phone and alerted Lt. Elizabeth Harding, the chief nurse.

Within minutes Harding arrived at the building, one of a series of aging limestone structures with a combined capacity of 3,068 beds. She was immediately confronted with two more soldiers with symptoms matching Gitchell's.

Harding wasted no time. She grabbed the wall phone and called her commanding officer, Col. Edward R. Schreiner, a 45-year-old army surgeon, rousing the sleeping doctor from his bed.

Schreiner listened to Harding with growing alarm. He had been dreading an outbreak of infectious disease at the overcrowded army base, and what he was hearing from Harding sounded ominous.

He put the phone down, jumped out of bed, dressed hurriedly, and raced to the hospital in the sidecar of a motorcycle driven by his orderly.

Within minutes he saw his worst nightmares coming true. Soldiers were arriving in droves, all of them suffering from what he recognized as some form of flu that appeared to be highly contagious.

By noon, the list of men stricken with the mysterious illness had grown to 107. Before the week was over, 522 men had been felled by it.

Albert Gitchell, army cook, had served as the advance guard for one of the deadliest epidemics in recorded history.

In a mere eight months it would kill 21 million people worldwide. In the United States alone, it would hit 20 million Americans, and kill a staggering 500,000, as many as died on both sides in America's bloody Civil War.

It would sweep across continents, leap over vast oceans, ravish whole villages, wiping out every single inhabitant in some of them. In the U.S., few families escaped its fury. Steadily mutating into more deadly forms as it spread, it would reach its zenith in October, killing with a fury that outmatched the worst of the war's carnage.

During the first week of November, it would kill 14,000 Londoners. Then, a week later, the war was over. And along with it, the worst of the epidemic.

History is filled with epidemics and plagues-outbreaks of disease that sweep across nations and continents leaving hordes of dead in their wake and then vanish as quickly as they appeared.

The more exotic are the best remembered - bubonic plague, smallpox, cholera, typhus, polio, and the latest scourge, Ebola Zaire - mainly because they are exotic.

Influenza - the flu virus - seems commonplace and less frightening than something as horrific as the Ebola Zaire virus. The flu bug hits everybody at one time or another. And some winters, mini-epidemics cut a wide swath across whole areas of the nation. We get it, we suffer its symptoms, sometimes for no more than a day or two, and then we recover.

But in its more robust forms, it's a killer, as deadly as anything lurking in the swamps and jungles of equatorial Africa, and far more contagious.

The Spanish Influenza (the word means influence in Spanish) is one of the lethal flu viruses. It's appearance in 1918 was a rerun. It has appeared and disappeared throughout recorded history under other names, or under no names at all. And every hundred years or so it has swept through large areas of the world, leaving piles of corpses behind, and the world's population markedly depleted.

More than 400 years before the birth of Christ, Hippocrates described an epidemic of a disease strikingly similar in its symptoms to the 1918 influenza strain. He wrote that it slaughtered an entire Athenian army.

Writing in the late 17th century, Noah Webster identified 44 instances of deadly flu epidemics that hit Europe in the past 500 years.

In 1852, Dr. Theophilus Thompson, a London, England, physician noted that the deadly variety of flu virus never seems far away:

"Influenza," he wrote, "does not, like the plague, desert for ages a country that which it has once afflicted."

Time and again the common flu bug has proven that it is capable of mutating into more violent forms. The bugs we're most familiar with -those that make us miserable for brief periods - are perfectly capable of turning into wildly contagious homicidal monsters. And that's what makes them far more frightening than the more exotic forms of contagion.

Coming seemingly out of nowhere, they can emerge as full-blown epidemics, do their deadly worst, and then go into hiding, sometimes for a century or more.

In the 1950s, the director of the World Influenza Center in London, Dr. Andrewes said: "I believe that the virus goes underground and perhaps does so all over the world ..." It is, he warned, still possible that a pandemic could return at any time "and kill its millions as happened in 1918-19."

Added Australian microbiologist Sir Frank Burnet: "Of all the virus diseases, influenza is probably that in which mutational changes in the virus are of greatest human importance. We can only guess what type of virus was responsible in 1918-19 and what changes took place during the pandemic."

Burnet noted that since the human flu virus was first isolated in 1933 and two strains, Influenza A and Influenza B identified, both have undergone striking changes in makeup. "Some of us believe that the influenza virus' chief means of survival is its constant mutation to new serological patterns ..." he wrote.

In 1918, the flu virus that felled Albert Gitchell and his fellow doughboys perfectly illustrated Dr. Burnet's point.

In five weeks it hit 1,127 soldiers at Fort Reillly. It killed a mere 46 of its victims and then seemed to burn itself out.

But it wasn't finished. It was just lying low. It next struck in early May, ravaging soldiers in two divisions that had just arrived in Europe from Fort Reilly. In a matter of days it had spread to AEF Headquarters and in a mere 12 days infected 132 soldiers stationed there. By July it was rampaging across the globe, slowly mutating into a more lethal form and killing more and more of its victims.

By October it had become an homicidal maniac, butchering its victims by the millions in every corner of the globe.

And then it gradually crept away and went into seclusion, waiting patiently for its next opportunity to kill a few million people.

In 1960, a virus similar to the 1918 Spanish flu made a brief appearance in Canada, perhaps to remind us that it's still out there, waiting patiently for another Albert Gitchell to come along.

I've been following this since it started, and it's fairly interesting. First, it took a good while before the outbreak was identified as influenza. Then, at one point, WHO teams in place were suddenly not quite sure it really was influenza. Now it seems to be influenza again.

Not too long ago, scientists in northern Canada exhumed some bodies of victims from the 1918 pandemic. The permafrost had preserved the remains to an extent that it was possible to study the effects of the virus on bodily tissues.

There was some concern that the virus was yet present, and could reawaken from dormancy.

There was some concern that the virus was yet present, and could reawaken from dormancy.

I ran across a link a few minutes ago (and now I can't remember where) that says that could indeed be a problem.

I see no resemblance to the "Spanish Flu" of 1918- this sounds like a fairly normal death rate for an Influenza "A" outbreak, especially in an impoverished country with little access to supportive care.

Read "FLU" by Gina Kolata for the "real thing".

>prophecy being fulfilled right before our eyes.

It does appear that the Pale Horse is running. I wonder if he is being spurred on by globalism or some other beast in the interest of saving the planet by what it determines as excess population and useless eaters.

Re 6:8 And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.

this sounds like a fairly normal death rate for an Influenza "A" outbreak

The death rate now seems far, far lower than in the first weeks. This was on August 7th:


Influenza in Madagascar - WHO Update
------------------------------------
The Ministry of Health has announced that the Institut Pasteur, Madagascar, 
has isolated influenza A (H3N2) viruses from 2 out of 39 samples taken from 
cases in Fianarantsoa province, an area where outbreaks of an 
influenza-like illness have been reported.

The Ministry of Health has updated the epidemiological data: Since Sun 4 
Jul 2002, a total of 1 291 cases and 156 deaths have been reported.

--
ProMED-mail

I heard about this flu epidemic last week. This will travel around the world rapidly if it gets beyod Madagascar.

Health care workers will have tobe carefully screened.

One of the problems with the flu is that people can be contagious and carriers before they are obviously sick.

[If anyone knows who the FR-doctors are, please bump them in. A little science would be helpful.]

It looks like it is spreading fast when the numbers infected on Aug 1 were 1,291 and the numbers four weeks later are 23,000.

Well... one possibility is that the thing that started and went undiagnosed for several week is still unknown, but that they have gotten a flu outbreak in the middle of it. The fatality rate during the first month seems to have been around 12%, four times higher than now. Assuming that the count for the first month is reasonably correct.

Influenza nearly killed me about 15 years ago. I caught a dose of the strain that was going around that year. I thought initially that I had a cold,and went home to sleep it off.

The next morning when I woke up,I was on my back,and there was so much goop in my lungs that my first breath triggered my gag reflex,and I started throwing up. Unfortunately,I was too weak to turn over immediately.

Of all the ignominius ways to check out,drowning in your own puke in your own bed is probably pretty high up on the list-finally I managed to turn over and get some air in my lungs,but I was quite literally a few seconds away from choking to death. The lesson is TAKE THE FLU SERIOUSLY!!!

About five years, as antique dealers, we bought some items that were wrapped in old newspapers from the 1900's. I'm a great reader of anything and was reading something from 1919 that spoke of a great flu (or something) outbreak that killed thousands and thousands of folks and one sentence remains with me that went something like this: "This could be nature's way of keeping the population under control". Does anyone on FR know anything about "nature's way of keeping the population under control"?

I live in Central New York State and a few years ago numerous dead squirrels were being spotted along roads. They were not hit by cars - they were just dead - no blood or injuries - laying along side of roads. There never was an explanation for the dead squirrels. I was quite a few of them myself. Too many squirrels and nature took over?

I usually don't take a Flu shot, but may consider one this year.

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