History - 1918 Flu Pandemic

Sources:

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.