Spain's Last 1918 Flu Survivor, Age 105 Says 'Be Careful'; Naples FL, 107- YO Recalls 1918 Epidemic
'Be careful': Spain's last 1918 flu survivor offers warning on coronavirus. José Ameal Peña, 105, is watching on anxiously as a new pandemic sweeps globe. The Guardian, March 22, 2020.
José Ameal Peña was four years old when the 1918 flu tore through his small fishing town in northern Spain, its deadly path narrated by the daily ringing of church bells.
More than a century later, Ameal Peña – believed to be Spain’s only living survivor of a pandemic said to be the deadliest in human history – has a warning as the world faces off against Covid-19. “Be careful,” he said. “I don’t want to see the same thing repeated. It claimed so many lives.”
The 1918 flu, known as the Spanish flu after the country’s press were among the first to report on it, killed between 50 and 100 million people around the world.
In Ameal Peña’s town of Luarca it claimed 500 lives – a quarter of the town’s population of 2,000. He watched from his window as a steady stream of funeral processions made their way to the cemetery.
In autumn 1918 he became the only one of his seven siblings to catch the flu. “I still can’t figure out how I’m here,” Ameal Peña, now 105, told the newspaper El Mundo. “When I woke up I could barely walk. I had to crawl on my hands and knees.” As he wrestled with a relentless fever, a doctor prescribed vapours of boiled eucalyptus and seaweed...
More, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/22/be-careful-spains-last-1918-flu-survivor-offers-warning-on-coronavirus
* Spanish Flu, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu
- Influenza patients in a U.S. Army hospital in France, 1918.
= new reply since forum marked as read
