1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic: The Virus That Infected One-Third Of The World
The Spanish influenza pandemic became one of the deadliest events in history. It infected as many as one in every four humans on the planet, and it resulted in an estimated 50–100 million deaths. The pandemic killed more people than World War I — and in a shorter amount of time.
- By Amos Chapple
The Spanish flu that spread around the world a century ago killing millions puts the coronavirus crisis in perspective.
As the virus began to spread, it was dubbed the "Spanish Influenza" for the sole reason that most European countries had muzzled their news media to control the flow of information during the war. Since Spain was neutral and its media free at the time, the first reports of the lethal new illness emerged from there.
With mass movements of people involved in the war effort, the virus rapidly spread to nearly every corner of the world and infected an estimated one-third of the world's population.
From New Zealand the disease spread to the Pacific island of Samoa, where it killed a staggering 22 percent of the entire population of 38,000 within two months. In Iran, up to 2.4 million -- which would be more than 20 percent of its people -- are estimated to have died. Some 300,000 were killed by the pandemic in Brazil, including the country's president-elect.
Estimates of the number killed around the world range from 17 million to 100 million. According to the World Health Organization, 2-3 percent of those infected died.
It is believed the virus sparked cytokine storms among healthy adults -- the overreaction of vigorous immune systems so severe that patients were effectively killed by their own bodies' immune response.
Perhaps the most unusual attempt to halt the pandemic was a "black wedding" held in Odesa in today's Ukraine. Black weddings were a somewhat fringe Jewish ritual for warding off pestilence by marrying two of society's "most unfortunate" in an elaborate ceremony held in a cemetery. One such wedding took place
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With no vaccine against the virus and antibiotics not yet discovered, only isolation and personal hygiene were effective in minimizing the Spanish flu's spread.
Before the outbreak of the coronavirus, which originated in China in late 2019, Tumpey said: "I think we also really have to be concerned about some of the bird-flu viruses that we see in Asia that are jumping from birds to humans and causing severe disease. If one of those viruses somehow figured out a way to spread efficiently from human to human, then we would have another pandemic on our hands."
Deepak Punjabi
Baguio City
Posted by: Deepak Punjabi <indigoblue2005@yahoo.com>
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