Fearing the Flu
You’d really have to be asleep at the wheel these days to not be aware of fears about the eventual certainty of a major flu pandemic. Like the coming of ‘The Big One’ earthquake that will rock California, or the rumblings of a volcano we know is gonna blow… predictions of a coming Killer Flu are not offered as a question of ‘IF’, but a matter of ‘WHEN’. Just yesterday the White House issued an Implementation Plan for our National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza.
So watcha gonna do about it? I figured reading a book about the last big flu pandemic was as good an idea as any. When author John Barry undertook to write about the 1918 Flu pandemic, the avian virus H5N1 wasn’t yet news. The 1997 outbreak that year in Hong Kong killed six of eighteen infected people. In addition to the accidental timeliness of his topic, Barry also realized that to tell the story of 1918, he’d have to provide some history on the overall state of medicine in the United States in the years leading up to it. And the thing is, it was pretty atrocious. But thanks to the leadership of a handful of medical pioneers such as William Henry Welch and the institutions they founded such at the Johns Hopkins Medical School, medicine in America was quickly catching up with Europe.And there was some other pretty significant underlying history involved in the 1918 flu pandemic as well, and that was World War I. Young healthy men were being trained as soldiers, in crowded camps, and being sent to fight in the trenches of Europe. And their gathering and movement provider carriers to deliver the influenza virus across the country and around the world.
This is a scary story. Somewhere between 50 – 100 million people lost their lives to the 1918 flu outbreak. And uncharacteristically, it was the young and healthy who most frequently suffered a fatal outcome, dying as a result of their own body’s overwhelming response to the virus. People woke up feeling fine, and dropped dead within hours. Death was fast and prevalent, information was unavailable or misleading, fear ruled.
History repeats itself, again and again. It’s often horrible. You can ignore it, or learn from it. Time will tell which we’ve done.