AM

The Spanish Flu

THE SPANISH FLU:  

  • German expressionist vampire films are sometimes believed to be metaphors for the Spanish flu  

  • A lot of countries still used heavy censorship so news of this pandemic was not spreading as it should have been to warn people 

  • The flu occurred during a period where there were tons of other stuff going on that distracted people from the flu 

  • The flu didn’t last very long (spring 1918- spring 1919 and then a brief outbreak in 1920) 

  • Estimated 2 billion people in the world, and estimated death toll of the Spanish flu is anywhere between 20 and 100 million people (half the world's population was infected)  

  • The reason why the disease had such a large death toll was because there were so many people that were infected, not because it was super deadly (death rate estimated to be 2-10%)  

  • Epidemic diseases are transmitted into humans by animals, so flu’s ony became prominent when humans started living in close proximity with animals  

  • There were 13 sever flus in the 18th century, 12 in the 19th, and 2 in the 20th century  

  • The 1918 epidemic (series of epidemics) had a series of things that stood out: the spread of the disease was nearly unprecedented, it seemed to appear in three different places all at once (there was outbreaks in America and China at the same time 

  • American soldiers going to the western front brought the Spanish flu to France, and soon it was running rampant in the French army, and from there it was spread to Spain (first wide scale reporting), then it reached German and British troops, and from there it reached Russia 

  • A lot of people suspected that the Spanish Flu was biological warfare 

  • The exchange of troops in WWI was the perfect breeding ground for the Spanish Flu 

  • Autopsy later showed that people who died from ‘the flu’ had recovered from the disease, but then got pneumonia 

  • The third wave was incredibly severe, it didn’t function like a normal flu (when doctors first encountered it, they didn’t know it was a flu, they thought it was cholera or the plague) symptoms: people couldn’t operate normally after an hour of their first symptoms, fever rose incredibly high, acroedema complications (fluid in the lungs, people turned blue and then coughed up blood), silent lung, high mortality rate, didn’t only kill infants and old people (hit people 25-35 worse), one theory for this was that their immune systems went haywire trying to identify the virus, and attacked itself, cytokine storm 

  • People still debate whether or not the Spanish flu is an organism 

  • Richard Pfieffer: thought he discovered what he called ‘haemophilus influenza’ (it was virus) but he thought it was bacteria  

  • Anti genetic drift 

  • During this period, public health begins to increase  

  • Walter Reed was very successful in treating yellow fever in Carribean 

  • Louis Pasteur's research on microbes in France 

  • Robert Koch in Germany  

  • WWI was the first conflict where more people died in enemy fire than exposure to the elements 

  • Where quarantines were active, the Flu was less of an issue (e.g. Australia)  

  • The countries that were aware they had been caught off gaurd began to form public health agencies – U.K Ministry of Health, Peoples Commissariat of Health (Russia)  

  • Some people believed that they would be able to fight the flu with alcohol, couldn’t really help people any more than telling them to rest and have aspirin  

  • Aspirin was released in 1889, so it wasn’t that old and it wasn’t very well tested, so the American Medical Association was telling people to take 25 tablets a day, and a great majority of the people who died from the flu may have actually died from poisoning caused by Aspirin overdose 

  • Hospitals were overwhelmed, no sort of quarantine was enforced, people were only encouraged to cover their mouths when they coughed (San Francisco encouraged masks) 

  • In some community's restaurant, store, and school hours were cut, theatres and libraries and churches were closed, in Minneapolis schools were closed   

  • There was a trend of improving general sanitation  

  • Aside from the deaths, another repercussion was the major decrease in people of working age, people lost their workers, average age of death in Europe was 33 

  • A lot of people got sick at the Paris peace conference  

  • The Spanish Flu still exists and is held in the Centre for Disease Control in Atlanta. Scientists found remnants of the virus in buried bodies in Germany and recreated it 

October 2nd, 2024: