The Associated Press ran an interesting article on survivors of the great flu pandemic of the early 20th century.
At the height of the flu pandemic in 1918, William H. Sardo Jr. remembers the pine caskets stacked in the living room of his family's house, a funeral home in Washington, D.C.
The city had slowed to a near halt. Schools were closed. Church services were banned. The federal government limited its hours of operation. People were dying — some who took ill in the morning were dead by night.
I can't even imagine what it must have been like living through that horror, given how little the average person still understood about diseases and how little the medical community knew to do about the spread of such illnesses.
The great flu pandemic killed at least 50 million people and possibly as many as 100 million people worldwide. The flu killed more people in the 24 weeks from 1918-1919 than AIDS has killed in 24 years.
In the United States, the first reported cases surfaced at an Army camp in Kansas as World War I began winding down. The virus quickly spread among soldiers at U.S. camps and in the trenches of Europe. It paralyzed many communities as it circled the world.
In the District of Columbia, the first recorded influenza death came on Sept. 21, 1918. The victim, a 24-year-old railroad worker, had been exposed in New York four days earlier. The flu swept through the nation's capital, which had attracted thousands of soldiers and war workers. By the time the pandemic had subsided, at least 30,000 people had become ill and 3,000 had died in the city.
There's a very interesting book out called The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History by John Barry. Barry's book describes how the virulent outbreak of the flu broke down civil society.
According to Barry, those still healthy were too panicked by the disease's violent symptoms (rib-cracking coughing spells, intense pain, a cyanosis of the skin so deep blue its like has never been seen since) to even look in on their ill neighbors. Some of the sick, and their children with them, simply starved to death for lack of attention.
Barry quoted one health official after he had failed to recruit a single volunteer: "Nothing seems to rouse them. Children are starving and still they hold back." Even in tight-knit rural communities, says Barry, neighbors didn't rally 'round.
Barry also says that such a flu pandemic is possible, even likely in modern times.
So, could it happen again? Barry thinks so, and he quotes the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences: "… another influenza pandemic is possibly inevitable and even overdue." The solution, he says, is for governments to immediately start making a major investment in the world's vaccine-producing infrastructure. "It will be a race," he says, "a race to the death."
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