The 1918 Flu Pandemic

[WalnutBaron]

There's been a lot of recent discussion here (and elsewhere) about the severity of the flu bug this winter. The CDC has said it's the worst in the last 15 years. But as bad as it is, it doesn't hold a candle to the Flu Pandemic of 100 years ago in 1918.

Beginning in January 1918 and not ending until December 1920, the pandemic of H1N1 virus infected an estimate 500 million people around the world and resulted in an estimated 50-100 million deaths during its nearly three-year run, making it one of the deadliest natural disasters in human history.

The first confirmed outbreak occurred at Camp Funston in Fort Riley, Kansas in March 1918, but investigative work conducted by a British team in 1999 found that the flu's origin was probably at a major troop staging area at Etaples, France--a perfect venue for an outbreak, as nearly 100,000 troops daily were being processed and moving through this location during the height of The Great War (later re-named World War I).

While the global mortality rate is not know for sure, it is estimated that the death rate for those who contracted the flu virus was 10-20%--an astounding rate when compared to the average death rate of about 0.1%. About 3-6% of the world's total population died. In the U.S., roughly 28% of the population was infected and an estimated 500,000-675,000 people died as a result. Another 50,000 people died in Canada.

Some have postulated that the flu epidemic was one of the deciding factors in forcing the end of The Great War, since it hit the Central Powers of Germany and Austria earlier and with more force than the Allies in 1918.

The general awareness of the 1918 Flu Pandemic is low, especially given the devastating impact it had on the world. But it is quite well known and remembered in the public health community--and remains a cautionary tale of how quickly and easily a virus can mutate with devastating effect.

 

[Jan M.]

My MIL who was born in 1916 and her mother both got that flu. Her father nursed them through it but never got it himself. She passed unexpectedly of an aneurysm at the age of 92. She always said she had such a good immune system due to having survived that flu. She rarely got sick and usually recovered quickly when she did.

She and I used to have some interesting discussions about what would happen if such a flu were to hit today. The standards of living and medical care are light years better today however we now have generations of people who grew up with vaccines and antibiotics so have never developed the hardly immune systems of their ancestors.

 

[MULTIZ321]

My maternal grandmother lost infant twins in 1918 to this Pandemic. She was heartbroken and carried their memory with her always.

For those interested in learning more about this flu pandemic, a good read is

"Flu: the Story of the Great Infuenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus that Caused It"
By Gina Kolata

Richard

 

[KarenLK]

My grandmother died of influenza in January 1919.

 

[CanuckTravlr]

My grandmother's brother was a lieutenant in the British Army in the Great War. He got all the way through the hell that was experienced by all troops in that war, only to die of the influenza in November 1918. It was always considered a tragic outcome in our family. May they all rest in peace. Lest we forget! Thanks for this posting.

 

[MULTIZ321]

The Spanish Flu - 10 Facts About the 1918 Pandemic That Killed More People Than WWI
By Kenneth C. Davis/ MHN/ militaryhistorynow.com

“While historians have catalogued the conflict’s causes and effects for a century now, the pandemic has largely fallen into history’s dustbin. Yet its effects were just as consequential and far reaching as the war itself.

THE SPRING OF 1918 was a dark time.

The war in Europe had been raging for nearly four years and there was no end in sight. The Bolshevik Revolution had knocked Russia out of the war. Germany unleashed an offensive that threatened annihilate the exhausted British and French armies on the Western Front. And Paris was under bombardment from a new German super gun with a range of 70 miles.

Then the Yanks arrived “Over There.” By May, a million U.S. troops were in France and more on the way.

During that fateful spring 100 years ago, the Americans helped turn the tide in Europe. But they also spread one of history’s most devastating outbreaks of disease, the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918.

The Spanish flu and the Great War were inseparably linked. While historians have catalogued the conflict’s causes and effects for a century now, the pandemic has largely fallen into history’s dustbin. Yet its effects were just as consequential and far reaching as the war itself.

Here’s what you need to know about a germ that destroyed far more lives than guns and steel...."

World War One helped transformed a 1918 outbreak of Type A Influenza H1N1 into a global pandemic that killed tens of millions. (Image source: WikiCommons.)


Richard

 

[taffy19]

My maternal grandmother lost infant twins in 1918 to this Pandemic. She was heartbroken and carried their memory with her always.

For those interested in learning more about this flu pandemic, a good read is

"Flu: the Story of the Great Infuenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus that Caused It"
By Gina Kolata

Richard

It also hit the Netherlands. My great aunt died and was expecting her first child. I never knew her but was named after her. I got to know my great uncle well and he told me about it how awful it was.

Another interesting twist was that the spice merchants didn’t get the flu while robbing the dead bodies of their belongings, if that’s is true?

 

[MULTIZ321]

Why Historians Ignored the Spanish Flu
By Mark Honigsbaum/ The Conversation/ theconversation.com

"To judge by the popularity of films like World War Z, pandemics are in vogue and none more so than the Spanish influenza of 1918-19. To mark the centenary of the pandemic this autumn, the BBC has commissioned Spanish Flu: In their own words, a major television docudrama on the pandemic, while 2018 has already seen the publication of several new titles revisiting the science and history of the flu.

Curious then that for the first 50 years after the Spanish flu swept around the globe, killing about 50-100m people, no one – least of all historians – gave it much thought, concentrating instead on the far more compelling story of the Great War. Indeed, in 1924 the Encyclopedia Britannica didn’t even mention the pandemic in its review of the “most eventful years” of the 20th century.

This neglect of the “Spanish influenza” – so-called because Spain was one of the few countries in 1918 to report the spreading illness – extended to the public sphere, hence the marked absence of memorials to the nurses and civilians, most of them young adults, who perished in the three waves of infection.

Why this should have been the case puzzled commentators at the time. “Never since the Black Death has such a plague swept over the face of the world … [and] never, perhaps, has a plague been more stoically accepted,” commented The Times in December 1918, at the height of the deadly second wave of the pandemic.

Major Greenwood, who co-wrote Britain’s official report on the pandemic, was similarly perplexed, remarking in 1935 that “there is some psychological interest in the fact … that actually the emotional impression created [by the influenza pandemic] was fainter than that produced by much less grave epidemiological happenings”.

Bad timing
One obvious reason was the way that the pandemic was overshadowed by World War I. The second wave of the pandemic coincided with the Allied assault on Cambrai in October 1918 and the collapse of the Hindenburg Line. Then in mid-November, just as flu deaths were peaking, came the armistice. The result was that many families buried their dead to the sounds of bells and hooters as people flocked to the streets to celebrate the peace.

Another was that at the time people had little appreciation of the scale of the mortality (in 1927, epidemiologists estimated the global death toll at just 21m).

But perhaps the most important reason is that, unlike the soldiers who gave their lives for king and country, the flu dead did not readily lend themselves to narratives of nationalism and sacrifice. Instead, they became the forgotten fallen....."

Burying flu victims, North River, Newfoundland and Labrador (1918). Wikimedia Commons


Richard

 

[WalnutBaron]

After posting this earlier this year, I bought and read The Great Influenza: The Story Of The Deadliest Pandemic In History by John Barry. It is excellent, chilling, and cautionary. And I have no doubt it was decisive in helping to end World War I.

 

[MULTIZ321]

Spanish Flu: The Killer That Still Stalks Us, 100 Years On
By Mark Honigsbaum/ World/ The Observer:Flu Pandemic/ The Guardian/ theguardian.com

"The pandemic wiped out up to 100 million lives, but scientists still struggle to explain what caused it. The answers could ensure that it never strikes again.

One hundred years ago this month, just as the first world war was drawing to a fitful close, an influenza virus unlike any before or since swept across the British Isles, felling soldiers and civilians alike. One of the first casualties was the British prime minister and war leader, David Lloyd George.

On 11 September 1918, Lloyd George, riding high on news of recent Allied successes, arrived in Manchester to be presented with the keys to the city. Female munitions workers and soldiers home on furlough cheered his passage from Piccadilly train station to Albert Square. But later that evening, he developed a sore throat and fever and collapsed.

He spent the next 10 days confined to a sickbed in Manchester town hall, too ill to move and with a respirator to aid his breathing. Newspapers, including the Manchester Guardian, underplayed the severity of his condition for fear of presenting the Germans with a propaganda coup. But, according to his valet, it had been “touch and go”.

Lloyd George, then aged 55, survived, but others were not so lucky. In an era before antibiotics and vaccines, the “Spanish influenza” – so-called because neutral Spain was one of the few countries in 1918 where correspondents were free to report on the outbreak – claimed the lives of nearly 250,000 Britons. Cruelly for a nation that had seen the flower of British male youth mown down by German guns, the majority were adults aged 20 to 40. The mortality was the inverse of most flu seasons, when deaths fall most heavily on the elderly and the under-fives.

The global death toll was inconceivable: according to the most recent estimates, between 50 million and 100 million people worldwide perished in the three pandemic waves between the spring of 1918 and the winter of 1919. Adjusting for population growth, that is equivalent to between 200 million and 425 million today...."

Influenza victims in an emergency hospital near Camp Funston (now Fort Riley) in Kansas in 1918. Photograph: AP Photo/National Museum of Health


Richard

 

[PrairieGirl]

My grandfather's fiance died from this flu and her family returned her engagement ring to him. It was a beautiful opal which my grandmother later wore as a dinner ring and passed it on to me as a young adult because it was my birthstone. Every time I wear this ring someone comments on the fire of that opal and I use the history of the ring to remind them to get their flu shot!

 

[RNCollins]

I have a female patient whose mother died from the flu, shortly after her daughters birth (my patient is 99, she was born in 1918).