Spanish flu

The Spanish Flu Pandemic, also known as the Great Influenza Pandemic, the 1918 Flu Epidemic, and La Grippe, was an unusually severe and deadly strain of avian influenza, a viral infectious disease, that killed some 25 million to 50 million people worldwide in 1918 and 1919. It is thought to have been one of the most deadly pandemics so far in human history. It was caused by the H1N1 type of flu virus.

Social facts

While it usually only infected less than one-third of the population in most places and killed only a fraction of those infected, there were a number of towns in several countries where the entire population was wiped out. The only sizeable inhabited place with no documented outbreak of the flu in 1918–1919 was the island of Marajo at the mouth of the Amazon River in Brazil.

Related Topics:
Marajo - Amazon River - Brazil

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Many cities, states, and countries enforced restrictions on public gatherings and travel to try to stay the epidemic. In many places theaters, dance halls, churches and other public gathering places were shut down for over a year. Quarantines were enforced with little success. Some communities placed armed guards at the borders and turned back or quarantined any travellers. One U.S. town even outlawed shaking hands.

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Even in areas where morbidity was low, those incapacitated by the illness were often so numerous as to bring much of everyday life to a stop. Some communities closed all stores or required customers to not enter the store but place their orders outside the store for filling. There were many reports of places with no healthy health care workers to tend the sick and no able bodied grave diggers to inter the dead. Mass graves were dug by steam shovel and bodies buried without coffins in many places.

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The social effects were intense due to the speed of the epidemic. AIDS killed 25 million in its first 25 years, but the Spanish flu may have killed as many in only 25 weeks beginning in September 1918.

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The Spanish Flu vanished within eighteen months, and the actual cause was not determined at the time. It appears to have been an H1 virus type. (The outbreaks of bird flu in Hong Kong in 1997 and other parts of Asia since then are an H5 type.) The influenza virus was not understood by medical science at the time, and most contemporary effort was spent in an unsuccessful quest to find a vaccine to the supposed bacterial cause of the disease, Bacillus influenza, which was in fact only one of several causes of secondary pneumonia associated with the epidemic. Two much milder influenza pandemics followed the Spanish Flu: the Asian Flu in 1957, and the Hong Kong Flu in 1968.

Related Topics:
Virus - Bacterial - Bacillus influenza - Asian Flu - 1957 - Hong Kong Flu - 1968

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It has been suggested that the stresses of combat, possibly combined with the effects of chemical warfare, may have weakened soldiers' immune systems thereby increasing their vulnerability to the disease and accelerating its spread. Certainly the close quarters and mass movement of troops accelerated the process.

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Bayer aspirin was just hitting the market in the U.S. at the time of the Spanish flu, but because Bayer was a German company, and World War I was happening at that time, many Americans distrusted it and thought that it was a form of germ warfare. This theory was even suggested by U.S. government officials. http://www.cnn.com/2005/HEALTH/conditions/10/07/1918.flu.witness/index.html

Related Topics:
Bayer - World War I

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