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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsWhat was the pandemic in the early part of the 20th century?
My mother told me about how sick everyone was. She was a child in El Paso Tx and everyone in her family survived. I figure I'm gonna be OK during this scare. I am 80 now and in excellent shape. I guess somehow my genes were meant to survive, but damn...(she lived to be 93)...
greenman3610
(3,947 posts)JHB
(37,130 posts)***
It is estimated that one third of the global population was infected,[2] and the World Health Organization estimates that 23% of those who were infected died (case-fatality ratio).[52] Estimates vary as to the total number who died. An estimate from 1991 says it killed 2539 million people.[53] A 2005 estimate put the death toll at probably 50 million (less than 3% of the global population), and possibly as high as 100 million (more than 5%).[54][55] But a reassessment in 2018 estimated the total to be only about 17 million,[3] though this has been contested.[56] With a world population of 1800 to 1900 million,[57] these estimates correspond to between 1 and 6 percent of the population.
This flu killed more people in 24 weeks than HIV/AIDS killed in 24 years.[58] However, the Black Death killed a much higher percentage of the world's then smaller population.[59]
The disease killed in every area of the globe. As many as 17 million people died in India, about 5% of the population.[60] The death toll in India's British-ruled districts was 13.88 million.[61]
JaneQPublic
(7,113 posts)NutmegYankee
(16,177 posts)Often called Spanish flu even though its thought it had central USA origin. Spain wasnt doing wartime censorship, so they freely reported the impacts.
dalton99a
(81,065 posts)How the Horrific 1918 Flu Spread Across America
The toll of historys worst epidemic surpasses all the military deaths in World War I and World War II combined. And it may have begun in the United States
By John M. Barry
Smithsonian Magazine
November 2017
Haskell County, Kansas, lies in the southwest corner of the state, near Oklahoma and Colorado. In 1918 sod houses were still common, barely distinguishable from the treeless, dry prairie they were dug out of. It had been cattle countrya now bankrupt ranch once handled 30,000 headbut Haskell farmers also raised hogs, which is one possible clue to the origin of the crisis that would terrorize the world that year. Another clue is that the county sits on a major migratory flyway for 17 bird species, including sand hill cranes and mallards. Scientists today understand that bird influenza viruses, like human influenza viruses, can also infect hogs, and when a bird virus and a human virus infect the same pig cell, their different genes can be shuffled and exchanged like playing cards, resulting in a new, perhaps especially lethal, virus.
We cannot say for certain that that happened in 1918 in Haskell County, but we do know that an influenza outbreak struck in January, an outbreak so severe that, although influenza was not then a reportable disease, a local physician named Loring Minera large and imposing man, gruff, a player in local politics, who became a doctor before the acceptance of the germ theory of disease but whose intellectual curiosity had kept him abreast of scientific developmentswent to the trouble of alerting the U.S. Public Health Service. The report itself no longer exists, but it stands as the first recorded notice anywhere in the world of unusual influenza activity that year. The local newspaper, the Santa Fe Monitor, confirms that something odd was happening around that time: Mrs. Eva Van Alstine is sick with pneumonia...Ralph Lindeman is still quite sick...Homer Moody has been reported quite sick...Pete Hessers three children have pneumonia ...Mrs J.S. Cox is very weak yet...Ralph Mc-Connell has been quite sick this week...Mertin, the young son of Ernest Elliot, is sick with pneumonia,...Most everybody over the country is having lagrippe or pneumonia.
Several Haskell men who had been exposed to influenza went to Camp Funston, in central Kansas. Days later, on March 4, the first soldier known to have influenza reported ill. The huge Army base was training men for combat in World War I, and within two weeks 1,100 soldiers were admitted to the hospital, with thousands more sick in barracks. Thirty-eight died. Then, infected soldiers likely carried influenza from Funston to other Army camps in the States24 of 36 large camps had outbreakssickening tens of thousands, before carrying the disease overseas. Meanwhile, the disease spread into U.S. civilian communities.
The influenza virus mutates rapidly, changing enough that the human immune system has difficulty recognizing and attacking it even from one season to the next. A pandemic occurs when an entirely new and virulent influenza virus, which the immune system has not previously seen, enters the population and spreads worldwide. Ordinary seasonal influenza viruses normally bind only to cells in the upper respiratory tractthe nose and throatwhich is why they transmit easily. The 1918 pandemic virus infected cells in the upper respiratory tract, transmitting easily, but also deep in the lungs, damaging tissue and often leading to viral as well as bacterial pneumonias.
The Velveteen Ocelot
(115,276 posts)I lost a couple of great-aunts in that epidemic.
elleng
(130,138 posts)BunnyMcGee
(460 posts)[link:https://www.historyofvaccines.org/content/new-york-city-polio-epidemic|
2000 died in NYC alone and 6000 is US
gopiscrap
(23,674 posts)Yonnie3
(17,376 posts)My brother and I chanced across a graveyard on a farm road near Blacksburg, Virginia. There was a row of small graves that were not marked. From surrounding markers we guessed they were in the 1915 ~ 1920 time frame.
A little internet research found this:
I find the two phase aspect troubling.
https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/influenza-epidemic/
The plague emerged in two phases. In late spring of 1918, the first phase, known as the "three-day fever," appeared without warning. Few deaths were reported. Victims recovered after a few days. When the disease surfaced again that fall, it was far more severe. Scientists, doctors, and health officials could not identify this disease which was striking so fast and so viciously, eluding treatment and defying control. Some victims died within hours of their first symptoms. Others succumbed after a few days; their lungs filled with fluid and they suffocated to death.
The plague did not discriminate. It was rampant in urban and rural areas, from the densely populated East coast to the remotest parts of Alaska. Young adults, usually unaffected by these types of infectious diseases, were among the hardest hit groups along with the elderly and young children. The flu afflicted over 25 percent of the U.S. population. In one year, the average life expectancy in the United States dropped by 12 years.
It is an oddity of history that the influenza epidemic of 1918 has been overlooked in the teaching of American history. Documentation of the disease is ample, as shown in the records selected from the holdings of the National Archives regional archives. Exhibiting these documents helps the epidemic take its rightful place as a major disaster in world history.
A couple of years later we found that the graveyard had been cleaned up and several markers added. The small graves still had no markers.
Brother Buzz
(36,214 posts)The Spanish Flu ran through the training camps faster than shit through a goose. Scary!
RockRaven
(14,782 posts)CTyankee
(63,771 posts)MFM008
(19,776 posts)Recommended.
malaise
(267,810 posts)at this time
CTyankee
(63,771 posts)I am hopeful that this will all calm down so we can go...
beachbumbob
(9,263 posts)and that was before the vast transportation we have today. Local mansions in my town were turned into makeshift field hospitals with dead and dying in the hallways. Want a shock? Go into your local cemetery and few the number of headstones with 1918/1919 as year of death.
It was so bad in Philadelphia that hundreds of dead were being removed from people's houses PER DAY, and city lost 20,000 dead
keithbvadu2
(36,362 posts)Spanish Flu 1918