I will suggest further reading if readers want to learn more about the 1918 pandemic at the end of this article. [162] Paradoxically however, African Americans were relatively spared by the pandemic. [218], One of the few things known for certain about influenza in 1918 and for some years after was that it was, except in the laboratory, exclusively a disease of human beings. [102] There were also beliefs that the Germans were behind it, for example by poisoning the aspirin manufactured by Bayer, or by releasing poison gas from U-boats.[103]. It also inspired a search for causes and cures that contributed to medical innovation in World War II, and technologies we still use today. [156][68] Similarly, in the city of Shanghai – which had a population of over 2 million in 1918 – there were only 266 recorded deaths from influenza among the Chinese population in 1918.
[209] This ancestor virus diverged about 1913–1915 into two clades (or biological groups), which gave rise to the classical swine and human H1N1 influenza lineages. In 1918 an epidemic dubbed the Spanish flu killed at least 50 million people. [95] Wearing face masks became common in some places, such as Japan, though there were debates over their efficacy. [58][57] According to Oxford, a similar outbreak occurred in March 1917 at army barracks in Aldershot,[59] and military pathologists later recognized these early outbreaks as the same disease as the Spanish flu.
These outbreaks probably lessened the significance of the influenza pandemic for the public. [141] The country was going through the Persian famine of 1917–1919 concurrently. The death toll is typically estimated to have been somewhere between 17 million and 50 million, making it one of the deadliest pandemics in human history.[4]. [35], The second wave began in the second half of August, probably spreading to Boston and Freetown, Sierra Leone by ships from Brest, where it had likely arrived with American troops or French recruits for naval training. [156] As a whole, accurate data from China's port cities show astonishingly low mortality rates compared to other cities in Asia. [161], There were also geographic patterns to the disease's fatality. Lasting from February 1918 to April 1920, it infected 500 million people—about a third of the world's population at the time—in four successive waves. 1942: A bivalent (two component) vaccine that offers protection against influenza A and influenza B viruses is produced after the discovery of influenza B viruses. [36] Helped by troop movements, it spread over the next two months to all of North America, and then to Central and South America, also reaching Brazil and the Caribbean on ships. So the vaccine contained a mixture of both types—a precedent still followed today. [128] In Canada, 50,000 died. [146] This huge death toll resulted from an extremely high infection rate of up to 50% and the extreme severity of the symptoms, suspected to be caused by cytokine storms. Skr. Until recently, almost all flu vaccines have been manufactured using fertilized chicken eggs to propagate the virus. [17], Alternative names were also used at the time of the pandemic. [156], The pandemic mostly killed young adults. [174], Survivors faced an elevated mortality risk. [119] In the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), 1.5 million were assumed to have died among 30 million inhabitants.
[18] In Spain itself, the nickname for the flu, the "Naples Soldier", was adopted from a 1916 operetta, The Song of Forgetting (La canción del olvido) after one of the librettists quipped that the play's most popular musical number, Naples Soldier, was as catchy as the flu. Some analyses have shown the virus to be particularly deadly because it triggers a cytokine storm, which ravages the stronger immune system of young adults. [94] Nevertheless, actions were taken. Vaccines were also developed, but as these were based on bacteria and not the actual virus, they could only help with secondary infections. The events of today are the fruit of past decisions, and our options for responses to them can be found in those of our predecessors. [62], In 1993, Claude Hannoun, the leading expert on the Spanish flu at the Pasteur Institute, asserted the precursor virus was likely to have come from China and then mutated in the United States near Boston and from there spread to Brest, France, Europe's battlefields, the rest of Europe, and the rest of the world, with Allied soldiers and sailors as the main disseminators. 1923. [137], Bristol Bay, a region of Alaska populated by indigenous people, suffered a death rate of 40 percent of the total population, with some villages entirely disappearing.
Scientists thought that influenza was caused by a bacterium they called Baccilus influenzae (now known as Hemophilus influenzae.) [63] Hannoun considered several alternative hypotheses of origin, such as Spain, Kansas, and Brest, as being possible, but not likely. China may have experienced a relatively mild flu season in 1918 compared to other areas of the world. Avery’s work built on the very important work of Frederick Griffiths, work that Avery initially set out to disprove. [144] Almost a quarter of the working population of Kimberley, consisting of workers in the diamond mines, died. During the research for this vaccine, it was discovered that immunity against one type of virus does not give immunity against the other. [120] In Tahiti, 13% of the population died during one month.