Bill Potter's History Hole

1918 Flu Pandemic I was going through old family photos and ran across one of my paternal great grandfather, John Maness who died of the great flu pandemic of 1918-1919 at the age of 36. My grandmother had just turned 11 years old when her father died and always suspected that she herself brought the flu virus home from school. Not an easy thing to live with even though she was completely blameless . In 1918 the first cases of Spanish Influenza were confirmed in an army barrack in Fort Riley Kansas, within days the disease had already reached Queens, New York. Troop movements during World War 1 hastened the spread of the disease with it reaching Africa, Europe and Asia by August and left a toll of between 50 and 100 million dead before the pandemic suddenly ended. Unlike most other strains of influenza the 1918 version seemed to attack and kill mainly young adults who were in the prime of their lives leaving the elderly and children largely unaffected. Some doctors have speculated that what was happening involved the flu turning peoples own immune systems against them therefore the very young and very old having weaker immune systems where in far less danger than people with healthy immune systems. Many people at the time referred to the pandemic as the 3-day flu because the standard amount of time to elapse between first symptoms and death was only 3 days. One observer wrote, "One of the most striking of the complications was hemorrhage from mucous membranes, especially from the nose, stomach, and intestine. Bleeding from the ears and petechial hemorrhages in the skin also occurred. This had to be a terrifying sight known only to the victims of the flu but to their families and other eyewitnesses. Original estimates said that 30 to 50 million people worldwide died due to the Spanish influenza outbreak but more modern estimates claim the number can be as high as 80 to 100 million people. The Spanish Flu killed more people in 24 months than the AIDS virus killed in 24 years and more than the medieval Black Death killed in its entirety. Even in areas where mortality was low, so many were incapacitated that much of everyday life was hampered. Some communities closed all stores or required customers to leave orders outside. There were reports that the health-care workers could not tend the sick nor the gravediggers bury the dead because they too were ill. Mass graves were dug by steam shovel and bodies buried without coffins in many places. nce 1918, there have been several other influenza pandemics, although none as deadly. A flu pandemic from 1957 to 1958 killed around 2 million people worldwide, including some 70,000 people in the U.S., and a pandemic from 1968 to 1969 killed approximately 1 million people, including some 34,000 Americans. More than 12,000 Americans perished during the H1N1 (or “swine flu”) pandemic that occurred from 2009 to 2010 these were all horrific tragedies but pale in comparison to the absolute disaster of 1918. With the fact that the spread of the flu pandemic was aided by troop movements in World War 1 you could arguably add the fifty to a hundred million people killed by the flu to the 17 million people killed outright by Warfare which would cause the Great War to be by far the deadliest conflict in world history. They say war and disease go together like wine and roses and never was this more the case than in the World War 1- Spanish influenza combo from which we have not yet fully recovered societally, politically and as a species.