Influenza pandemic of 1918

[Airehead]

Could it happen again?  

[Ralphie ★]

What put that cheery little thought in your noggin?

[Airehead]

I was reading some research on the connection between flu and Parkinson’s-like symptoms that don’t show the genetic markers. 

[Road Runner]

My grandfather on my mother's side lost his first wife to the flu of 1918. 

Millions died.  A huge catastrophe in US history that is seldom mentioned or much thought about anymore..

[maddmaxx ★]

Shhh.  You're going to scare people.

[Airehead]

It killed millions of kids and old people as to be expected but is noteworthy in that it killed so many between 20&40 who were otherwise healthy. 

[Randomguy]

59 minutes ago, Airehead said:

Could it happen again?  

Theoretically, it is a virtual certainty that a pandemic will run through large swathes of the population at some point, at least according to science.

Wash your hands, people.

[Ralphie ★]

Just now, Randomguy said:

Wash your hands, people.

I always want to throttle people I see walking oot of the restroom withoot washing their hands.  Like Poppy the restaurant chef/owner on Seinfeld.

 

[Road Runner]

The epidemic of 1918 was a direct result of sending so many young men overseas during WWI.  They picked up flu viruses that were strange to people in the US and for which they had little or no immunity.  With so many people traveling all over the world these days, it is unlikely that a similar event would occur.

[Ralphie ★]

6 minutes ago, Road Runner said:

The epidemic of 1918 was a direct result of sending so many young men overseas during WWI.  They picked up flu viruses that were strange to people in the US and for which they had little or no immunity.  With so many people traveling all over the world these days, it is unlikely that a similar event would occur.

I am going to have to give you the Rick Henderson Harrison History Award for this one! 

 

[Randomguy]

5 minutes ago, Road Runner said:

The epidemic of 1918 was a direct result of sending so many young men overseas during WWI.  They picked up flu viruses that were strange to people in the US and for which they had little or no immunity.  With so many people traveling all over the world these days, it is unlikely that a similar event would occur.

I am not so sure about that.  In NYC, everyone travels here from every part of the globe, and they bring their own new types of PRI with them.  Bunches of people catch whatever African, Spanish, or Klingon pox gets brought in.  More than likely, it will start here and spread to your neck of the woods within days.

People do know much more about hygiene now, and virology, but just as everything adapts, there will be a culling before the adaptation.

[Road Runner]

4 minutes ago, RalphWaldoMooseworth said:

I am going to have to give you the Rick Henderson History Award for this one! 

 

I posted a thread about the 1918 flu epidemic a while back and about how people, or history seems to have forgotten about it.  I forget the numbers, but IIRC, it seems like more people died in the 1918 epidemic than from all wars the US has ever fought.

[Dirtyhip]

Critical differences today vs. 1918.  Vaccines and medical science has evolved.  Get your flu shot.   Wash your hands.  Exercise, sleep enough and eat well.

Lots of people at work have been ill already.  I am trying my best to stay strong.  So far, so good.

[Ralphie ★]

1 minute ago, Road Runner said:

I posted a thread about the 1918 flu epidemic a while back and about how people, or history seems to have forgotten about it.  I forget the numbers, but it seems like more people died in the 1918 epidemic than from all wars the US has ever fought.

I definitely don;t remember it from high school.  In fact, I don't remember much modern history being covered there at all, like past 1900 or so.  Weird.

[jsharr ★]

Not to the same degree  but it could happen.  

[Ralphie ★]

In other history news, the old man from Pawn Stars died in 2018 and they are expanding the show to one hour, and will do more of the Rick Harrison history thing. 

[JerrySTL ★]

Not unless you have a time machine. 

[Longjohn ★]

When I was in high school they didn’t even cover the ongoing Vietnam war.

[Randomguy]

8 minutes ago, Dirtyhip said:

Critical differences today vs. 1918.  Vaccines and medical science has evolved.  Get your flu shot.   Wash your hands.  Exercise, sleep enough and eat well.

Lots of people at work have been ill already.  I am trying my best to stay strong.  So far, so good.

WRONG!  Ok, part of it is right, but the flu shot is well below 50% effective most years.  You are also forgetting that large numbers of people who can't afford insurance also work 3 jobs and are often preparing the food you eat in restaurants, and they simply cannot afford to take time off work.  They are sneezing and wiping their hands on their pants, then grabbing your plate and bringing it out to you.  They some of those now sick customers go to the hospital and give it to K, who would like a little action, thank you very much, before he starts to feel sick and then you already have it, too.

[Randomguy]

4 minutes ago, jsharr said:

Not to the same degree  but it could happen.  

The CDC says it is a virtual lock that some pandemic will significantly affect human population worldwide at some point.  

[jsharr ★]

2 minutes ago, Randomguy said:

The CDC says it is a virtual lock that some pandemic will significantly affect human population worldwide at some point.  

Toxic PRI

[Road Runner]

2 minutes ago, Randomguy said:

 In NYC, everyone travels here from every part of the globe, and they bring their own new types of PRI with them.  Bunches of people catch whatever African, Spanish, or Klingon pox gets brought in.

This is what helps us build up immunities to foreign strains of disease.  Before WWI, people did not travel very much and were much more isolated and more vulnerable to different strains of the flu.  This was especially true regarding North America/Europe/Asia.  Today, we are regularly exposed to foreign viruses and we develop anti-bodies to protect us.

We are also a lot smarter about these things than people were a hundred years ago and it is unlikely that we would allow anything resembling the 1918 event to reoccur..

[Road Runner]

BTW, this same sort of thing is what killed off untold numbers of Native Americans.  They had absolutely no immunity to European diseases.

[Prophet Zacharia]

38 minutes ago, RalphWaldoMooseworth said:

I definitely don;t remember it from high school.  In fact, I don't remember much modern history being covered there at all, like past 1900 or so.  Weird.

It was called “current events” back then.

[Randomguy]

23 minutes ago, Road Runner said:

This is what helps us build up immunities to foreign strains of disease.  Before WWI, people did not travel very much and were much more isolated and more vulnerable to different strains of the flu.  This was especially true regarding North America/Europe/Asia.  Today, we are regularly exposed to foreign viruses and we develop anti-bodies to protect us.

We are also a lot smarter about these things than people were a hundred years ago and it is unlikely that we would allow anything resembling the 1918 event to reoccur..

The report found that, in addition to being airborne, a pathogen with the potential to cause a global pandemic disaster would likely have the following traits:

• It would be contagious during the "incubation period," before people show any symptoms, or when people have only mild symptoms.
• It would be a microbe that most people are not immune to, so there would be a large population of susceptible human hosts.
• It wouldn't have an existing treatment or prevention method.
• It would have a "low but significant" fatality rate.

 

Although the final trait may sound surprising, Adalja noted that a pathogen doesn't have to have a high fatality rate, or kill the majority of people infected, to cause majority societal disruptions. "It just has to make a lot of people sick," he told Live Science. (A pathogen with a high fatality rate could kill too many people too quickly, and therefore run out of "hosts" to spread further, the report noted.)

Indeed, the infamous "Spanish" influenza pandemic of 1918 had a fatality rate of just 2.5 percent, but because it infected hundreds of millions of people, it caused an estimated 50 million deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In addition, according to something called the "host density threshold theorem" a virus that kills too many people will "run out of susceptible hosts and be extinguished," the report said.

The report also found that a group of viruses known as RNA viruses have the most potential to cause a global pandemic disaster, in part because these viruses mutate more easily than other types do. This group includes well-known viruses such as the flu (influenza) and SARS, but also common cold viruses, such as enteroviruses and rhinoviruses, as well as respiratory syncytial virus.

While the flu has received a lot of attention for its ability to cause pandemics, many other viruses in this group have not. There's "a whole host of viral families that get very little attention when it comes to pandemic preparedness," Adalja said.

Historically, authorities have prepared for pandemics by focusing on a list of "usual suspects" — diseases that have caused outbreaks in the past, such as the flu and SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome), or those that could be used as biological weapons. But this approach doesn't account for pathogens that aren't currently known or haven't historically caused outbreaks, the researchers said.

[Road Runner]

It is hard to even imagine the panic that would ensue if a similar event occurred today in our modern world of social media and 24-hour news.  Back in 1918, there were only newspapers.  Not even any radio.

[Dirtyhip]

15 minutes ago, Randomguy said:

WRONG!  Ok, part of it is right, but the flu shot is well below 50% effective most years.  You are also forgetting that large numbers of people who can't afford insurance also work 3 jobs and are often preparing the food you eat in restaurants, and they simply cannot afford to take time off work.  They are sneezing and wiping their hands on their pants, then grabbing your plate and bringing it out to you.  They some of those now sick customers go to the hospital and give it to K, who would like a little action, thank you very much, before he starts to feel sick and then you already have it, too.

Don't eat in restaurants.  I rarely do this.  

Yeah, we both work in places with a high probability of flu exposure.  LOL, on Halloween, I was giving out candy.  This little kid coughed right in my face.  Afterward he continued to cough a lot,  Yup, exposure.

In regards to the vaccine, some years it is not the best strain.  I really don't have a lot of bad side effects from it.  This year, my husband and I both felt a little icky for about a day afterward.  Still worth it.  Someone at work had the full blown flu.  I worked directly with him the day before he fell ill.  I even touched his papers that he had pawed over.  Flu shot?  Strong immune system?  Not sure.  Maybe both helped me.  I have been dosing with essential oils a lot.  There is one specifically for bacteria and immune boosting.  That is my best friend this season.  I think most of the time people blame the shot for flu, when they already were coming down with it and didn't know it.

 

[Scrapr ★]

1 hour ago, Road Runner said:

The epidemic of 1918 was a direct result of sending so many young men overseas during WWI.  They picked up flu viruses that were strange to people in the US and for which they had little or no immunity.  With so many people traveling all over the world these days, it is unlikely that a similar event would occur.

except for you know.....ebola 

[Randomguy]

24 minutes ago, Dirtyhip said:

I think most of the time people blame the shot for flu, when they already were coming down with it and didn't know it.

I don't think anyone blames the shot for the flu, not normal people, anyway.  I just think it doesn't work for me, and I have flu like symptoms for a week when I get the shot, then typically get the flu in addition at some point.  I would rather have those symptoms once than twice.

I can't see ever getting the flu shot again.  You don't eat at restaurants, but the people that stock grocery shelves do, and grocery stockers are well known for never washing their hands in Oregon.  

[Dirtyhip]

1 hour ago, Randomguy said:

I don't think anyone blames the shot for the flu, not normal people, anyway.  I just think it doesn't work for me, and I have flu like symptoms for a week when I get the shot, then typically get the flu in addition at some point.  I would rather have those symptoms once than twice.

I can't see ever getting the flu shot again.  You don't eat at restaurants, but the people that stock grocery shelves do, and grocery stockers are well known for never washing their hands in Oregon.  

Who knows, maybe all that bacteria is why I am so healthy.  

I just made some soap with my On Guard essential oil in it.  It acts in an anti bacterial way, but without things like triclosan in it.  Smells really good too.  I need a better soap mold.  I am reusing things for that, but it is not ideal.  Prone to leaks in the mold.

[Further]

AIDS came pretty damn close

[2Far ★]

I had a great grandfather by marriage who died in the 1918 outbreak. 

[2Far ★]

6 minutes ago, 2Far said:

I had a great grandfather by marriage who died in the 1918 outbreak. 

She remarried, got divorced and then married PopPop, who I knew. I only found out thru Ancestry.com about the middle one. 
 

[MickinMD ★]

10 hours ago, Airehead said:

Could it happen again?  

It's possible but less likely because a majority of people in advanced nations get flu shots each year.

Additionally, a study that was on Johns Hopkins Hospital's website but I can't find it now said that if everyone had the pneumonia vaccine back in 1918, the deaths from the Spanish Flu Epidemic in 1918-19 would have been less than half of what actually happened.

If you look closely at the statistics, relative few people listed as dying of the flu actually die from the flu itself. Their systems are weakened and they mostly die of pneumonia.

I personally made sure I had the two pneumonia shots, 5 years apart, that are supposed to be good for life for preventing virtually 100% of the bacteria that cause pneumonia.  That and my annual October flu shot doesn't guarantee anything, but every little bit helps.

[Airehead]

What if it were a new virus like Ebola launched by terrorists?  Could that be fact or is it fiction?

[late]

My grandfather caught that 1918 flu. One popular treatment at the time was to go out and get roaring drunk. He woke up a week later in the morgue.

[shootingstar]

Hmm... in China just reported in last 2 wks., there were 2 cases of people with bubonic plague..a medieval plague disease that has resurfaced again.

As for avoiding restaurants...one way is to eat cooked food for starters and perhaps if one is so concerned, to stick to places where one feels comfortable as a regular customer.  I'm willing to bet a lot of national chain restaurants try to be strict on complying to food safety.  a franchise can't afford to taint the reputation of their national firm.

I will add the municipal water treatment places....the security is strict.  Even to other employees working in other depts.

 

[Page Turner]

...I just gave away my book on the pandemic of 1918 last week, to the Friends of the Library.

 

 

Crosby's closing chapters were interesting, because currently nobody has much data on what that influenza strain was, or how it evolved.  There seems to be some association with an agricultural complex that includes pigs (and possibly cows. IIRC). The nature of viruses was almost unknown at that point in time, and a lot of the research on viruses came much later on.  They available equipment for observation needed to evolve before the work could be done on viruses. The guys who more or less figured this strain of influenza out were using ferrets as research animals, and they got lucky, to some extent. We've already had a global pandemic similar in nature in our lifetimes called AIDS.  Not sure of the total death toll from AIDS so far, but it continues climbing.

[Page Turner]

On 11/30/2019 at 7:41 AM, Road Runner said:

The epidemic of 1918 was a direct result of sending so many young men overseas during WWI.  They picked up flu viruses that were strange to people in the US and for which they had little or no immunity.  With so many people traveling all over the world these days, it is unlikely that a similar event would occur.

...the Spanish flu was already here.  What WW 1 did was to cluster large groups of the vulnerable population (young men in their 20's and 30's) in crowded living conditions and miserable accommodations.  Some of the percentage of troop transport deaths by ship from the US to the war in Europe are astonishing.  And there was not much in the way of effective treatment, or even an understanding of the causation of the disease.  Anyway, some histories give the flu pandemic as one of the essential causes for the end of hostilities in WW 1.

[Randomguy]

On 11/30/2019 at 9:36 AM, Airehead said:

Could it happen again?  

Ok, all you smug bastards who say it couldn’t happen again, we have a perfect example of how it most certainly will happen again (and might be getting going right now). 
 

I am not saying that this is going to end up like the 1918 flu, but people do easily get overconfident about human ability to tell nature how nature will act without thinking things through. 

[Airehead]

Interesting point 

[shootingstar]

We don't avoid restaurants at any time during flu season.  We make sure it's cooked food. Cooked veggies, etc.  And if those veggies are shipped from far away, then all more the reason this food is cooked. Yes, that means avoiding salads if one is so concerned at this time.

For myself personally, I actually only seem to eat fresh raw veggie salad...ie. maybe 3-4 times per month.  At home, I'm not the person making salads.  He is.  Which then amounts for me, salads maybe 4-5 times per month or less at home.  Rest of the time, the veggies are cooked.  I've always been like this....for decades.

I'm talking about just the flu. 

So soup at a restaurant...yum.

So the objective is... do your fresh veggie, fruits shopping now where you know the sources are still "safe".

 

[Wilbur ★]

On 11/30/2019 at 10:50 AM, Randomguy said:

there will be a culling before the adaptation.

Natural selection.    Culling = good.  Prevention of culling = Greta. 

[Mr. Silly]

On 11/30/2019 at 9:36 AM, Airehead said:

Could it happen again?  

Some virus that is asymptomatic for a couple weeks but contagious through the air before it kills you could easily spread widely before it is identified.  It will happen and the flu shot will be of no help.

[donkpow]

I'm sorry, what was the question?

[2Far ★]

On 11/30/2019 at 9:45 AM, Road Runner said:

My grandfather on my mother's side lost his first wife to the flu of 1918. 

Millions died.  A huge catastrophe in US history that is seldom mentioned or much thought about anymore..

GGFo2 (Father of Mother of father of 2Far) died in flu of 1918

[donkpow]

Wasn't this thread a spin off of the 'all penises are dirty' thread?

[Mr. Silly]

On 11/30/2019 at 8:33 PM, MickinMD said:

It's possible but less likely because a majority of people in advanced nations get flu shots each year.

Flu shots are formulated based on what the CDC thinks will be the prevalent flu strain(s) that year.  The flu shot is really just a "best guess" of what is going to be a problem ailment.  A bacteria strain that causes a global pandemic most likely wouldn't be predicted by the CDC so the flu shot would be useless.

[donkpow]

Just now, Mr. Silly said:

Flu shots

The advantage in a flu shot that does not target the current virus is in the fact that the inoculation will prepare the body to fight viruses in general.

[Mr. Silly]

9 minutes ago, donkpow said:

The advantage in a flu shot that does not target the current virus is in the fact that the inoculation will prepare the body to fight viruses in general.

Just like with antibiotics, the disadvantage is over use of antiviral medications can result in resistant strains of the virus.