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When the United States entered WWI in April 1917, the fledgling pharmaceutical industry had something they had never had before: a large supply of human test subjects. During the war years of 1918 to 1919, the U.S. Army ballooned to 6 million men, of which 2 million were sent overseas. The Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research took advantage of this new pool of human guinea pigs to conduct vaccine experiments. In January 1918, vaccines were administered to soldiers at Ft. Riley, Kansas. Shortly afterward, the vaccine was offered by the Division Surgeon to the camp at large. The vaccine used...

The 1918 Influenza Pandemic was the deadliest in human history. But the virus was a part of the historical events of the time. The History Guy recalls the forgotten history of how the events of 1918 shaped, and were shaped by, the pandemic. It is history that deserves to be remembered.

A 101-year-old Italian man born during the Spanish flu pandemic has reportedly survived a coronavirus infection as the outbreak continues to ravage his country and spread globally. Gloria Lisi, the vice mayor of Rimini, a city on the coast of the Adriatic Sea in the Italian north, said the man had been released from a hospital earlier this week and returned to his family. She identified him only as Mr. P. "He made it. Mr. P. made it," said Lisi, according to the ANSA news agency. Lisi said the man was admitted to a hospital in Rimini last week and...

Blue lips. Blackened skin. Blood leaking from noses and mouths. Coughing fits so intense they ripped muscles. Crippling headaches and body pains that felt like torture. These were the symptoms of a disease that was first recorded in Haskell County, Kansas, one hundred years ago this week, in January 1918. From Kansas the illness spread quickly: not only throughout the U.S. but across the world. Eventually (if misleadingly) it became known as Spanish flu. And while its effects on the body were awful, the mortality rate was truly terrifying. During a pandemic that lasted two years from its outbreak in...

Doctors in the early 1900s dismissed Spanish flu as a 'minor infection' just years before it killed 50 million people, according to scientists. Countless lives could have been saved if medics had taken it seriously and worked out how to stop the virus before the disastrous outbreak in 1918, researchers say. A study has found there were investigations as early as 1915 into a mysterious illness which was killing World War I soldiers in France and England. ...

‘In the winter of 1918-1919, a flu pandemic affected 500 million people and killed between 40 million and 70 million. ’ In the autumn of 1918, a global influenza outbreak began that would claim more lives than World War I (or the Great War). The war itself, which ended in November 1918, had a significant impact on how the virus spread around the world – and even influenced the name Spanish Flu. Soldiers from Fort Riley, Kansas, ill with Spanish influenza at a hospital ward at Camp Funston (US Army Photographer) ___________________________________________________________________ There was nothing particular ‘Spanish’ about the flu:...

The flu arrived as a great war raged in Europe, a conflict that would leave about 20 million people dead over four years. In 1918, the flu would kill more than twice that number — and perhaps five times as many — in just 15 months. Though mostly forgotten, it has been called “the greatest medical holocaust in history.” Experts believe between 50 and 100 million people were killed. More than two-thirds of them died in a single 10-week period in the autumn of 1918. Never have so many died so swiftly from a single disease. In the United States...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpzxNoLZx0w

Examination of lung tissue and other autopsy material from 68 American soldiers who died of respiratory infections in 1918 has revealed that the influenza virus that eventually killed 50 million people worldwide was circulating in the United States at least four months before the 1918 influenza reached pandemic levels that fall. The study, using tissues preserved since 1918, was led by Jeffery K. Taubenberger, M.D., Ph.D., of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health. The researchers found proteins and genetic material from the 1918 influenza virus in specimens from 37 of...

Two teams of federal and university scientists announced today that they had resurrected the 1918 influenza virus, the cause of one of history's most deadly epidemics, and had found that unlike the viruses that caused more recent flu pandemics of 1957 and 1968, the 1918 virus was actually a bird flu that jumped directly to humans. The work, being published in the journals Nature and Science, involved getting the complete genetic sequence of the 1918 virus, using techniques of molecular biology to synthesize it, and then using it to infect mice and human lung cells in a specially equipped, secure...

WHAT: Secondary infections with bacteria such as Streptococcus pneumoniae, which causes pneumonia, were a major cause of death during the 1918 flu pandemic and may be important in modern pandemics as well, according to a new article in the Journal of Infectious Diseases co-authored by David M. Morens, M.D., senior advisor to the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health. The researchers examined 13 studies published between 1918 and 1920. During this time, many scientists erroneously believed that influenza was caused by bacteria, not a virus. As a result, researchers...