Textbook, pg. 621
National Geographic
This page, written by Dan Vergano and published on April 28, 2014, explains the phenomenon based around healthy adults being particularly vulnerable to the Spanish Flu.
Flu.gov
This site gave me the majority of my information as it is government-based and contains strict numbers and statistics around the 1918 flu pandemic.
Stanford
This page, written by Molly Billings in June of 2005, describes claims and reports by physicians during the 1918 flu pandemic and how the virus spread across the world.
Nurse handling a patient during the 1918 Flu pandemic
Poster created in an attempt to help prevent the spread of the flu
Sick patients crammed into a building
Patients with the flu at a hospital
Policemen wearing face masks during the flu outbreak
My topic for this
project was to study the flu pandemic of 1918, also known as the Spanish Flu. I
chose this as I was interested to how America coped with this horrific pandemic
and what the virus had done to not only America, but the entire world. The influenza
had spread across the world quickly and without warning at about the time the
war was coming to an end, in 1918. As America had entered the war towards its
end, around half of their casualties (112,000 deaths) were from the influenza
alone. However, further research proved to me that America was not the only
nation to have suffered greatly from this pandemic. Around 20-40% of the world
population was infected with the virus, resulting in nearly 50 million deaths
(675,000 of which were in America). But the real question remains: how did this
virus spread, and so quickly? How was it stopped, and what preventive measures
were placed in the communities to help prevent the spread of the virus?
The flu had come in
three waves, and began to appear as nothing other than the common cold. But by
the time that it had become a reportable disease (on September 27th) and it was
discovered that over 1/5 of the world population had been infected, it was too
widespread to control and so widespread that it revealed to actually be
impossible to properly treat and difficult to keep records. WWI had already
left communities with a shortage of medical personnel and supplies, and the
majority of medical personnel that remained had become sick themselves. The
Public Health Services were constantly asked for assistance in providing
medical personnel, but there were not nearly enough healthy medical personnel
available to help. In some cases, medical personnel would be dispatched to a
community to bring assistance, but they would actually become sick on their way
there. In cases where the medical personnel had successfully arrived, they
proved to be generally unprepared and not helpful in assisting sick patients.
The pandemic was so devastating that it has been recorded as the most
catastrophic pandemic in world history. It had caused more deaths in a single
year than four years of the Bubonic Plague (Black Death). Over ten times the
amount of Americans that died in WWI were killed by the influenza, causing the
average lifespan of Americans to drop by ten years.
The pandemic had
spread across the world through human carriers, along trade routes and shipping
lines. Outbreaks had swept across North America, Europe, Asia, Africa, Brazil,
as well as the South Pacific. The origins of the pandemic were unknown but widely
speculated upon, with theories such as it being the result of trench warfare,
as it was the possible creation by the combination of chemical fumes that arose
from biological weapons such as mustard gas. Other theories (quite hilariously)
claimed it to be a biological warfare tool created by the Germans. However,
despite all of these speculations, the true origin of the rather devastating
virus is thought to be from China, where the pandemic was the creation of a
rare genetic shift of the regular influenza virus.
As the pandemic
swept through the nation and across the world, vast preventive measures were
issued in communities. It was impossible to truly protect oneself from the
virus, but in an attempt to do so, the Public Health Departments distributed
gauze masks to be mandatorily worn in public. Also, as a result of the virus,
stores could not hold sales and funerals had a 15 minute limitation. Certain
towns required a signed certificate to enter and railroads would not accept
passengers without them. People who had ignored the flu ordinances had to pay
steep fines that were enforced by extra officers. As the pandemic spread,
bodies continued to pile up, causing a shortage of not only supplies and health
care workers, but also a shortage of coffins and gravediggers. There was also
such a vast shortage in hospital beds and doctors that schools and community
centers were used as hospital facilities, with students being drafted as
medical staff.
One physician
claimed "that patients with seemingly ordinary influenza would rapidly
develop the most viscous type of pneumonia that has ever been seen" and
later, when cyanosis appeared in the patients, "it was simply a struggle
for air until they would suffocate." Another physician recalls that the
influenza patients died struggling to clear their airways of a blood-tinged
froth that sometimes gushed from their nose and mouth. However, through this
horrific pandemic, one odd fact still remained, and one that presented plenty
of questions. This was that high illness and mortality rates were particularly
among healthy adults, from ages 20-50. The explanation for this is that people
born after 1889 had not been exposed as kids to the kind of flu that struck in
1918, thus leaving them particularly vulnerable to the virus. Older people had
already been exposed to similar flu strains, as they had built some immunities
to the influenza. This pandemic had brought immense devastation to the world,
however, through this pandemic, it brought communities together, as it also
proved a greater importance to science.
