Week 3 — Spanish Flu
Amelia S -
Hi guys! Welcome back to my blog, thanks for tuning in!!
This week I started working on my own research for my project, focusing on the first epidemic of the 100 years I’m covering — Spanish Flu. Spanish Flu was an (inaccurately named) pandemic that infected approximately 1/3 of the world’s population when it circulated in 1918. The pandemic killed between 50 and 100 million people over the span of a few months making it one of the deadliest epidemics in recorded history. Spanish Flu is especially interesting because, although the death toll is right up there with the black death, it’s barely a footnote in most histories of the period. My AP Euro textbook had dozens of pages on WWI and one sentence on Spanish Flu despite the pandemic killing more people than the war twice over.
I’ll probably keep talking about Spanish Flu in upcoming weeks, but for now here are some quick facts!
- Spanish Flu isn’t actually Spanish, but, because Spain was neutral in WWI, their press was less censored and reported openly on the pandemic before other countries
- The first recorded case of Spanish Flu was at a military base in Kansas and modern evidence points to the epidemic emerging from somewhere in that area
- Scientists have reconstructed the strain of flu that caused the 1918 pandemic from samples from Alaska and military warehouses
- While Spanish Flu was raging, many people thought that flu was caused by a bacteria — Haemophilus Influenzae – not the most accurate name in retrospect
- Spanish Flu was actually cause by Influenza A H1N1, the same subtype that caused the Russian Flu epidemic of 1977 (super interesting story, more on that later) and the 2009 Swine Flu pandemic
I’m currently reading FLU by Gina Kolata, which is primarily about the efforts to reconstruct the 1918 strain of flu virus. It does have some interesting things to say about public health though, especially how people tried to understand and fight the flu despite not knowing much of anything about viruses beyond that they were too small to see.
I also read the short novel Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Porter, which is about a woman in Denver who catches then recovers from Spanish Flu. The story was published in 1939, and Porter herself nearly died of Spanish Flu in her 20s. It’s not exactly scientific, but it does give an interesting insight into the attitude people had towards the flu epidemic while it was happening.
For my internship, I’m still refining the models from last week, and my advisor recommended some other analyses to look into along with trying to analyze the data as a function of specific years rather than birth cohorts. Tomorrow I’m going to listen in on a seminar at Hopkins about infection dynamics and immunization, which should be super interesting!
Thanks for reading, I’ll see you all next week!!
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