How many died in flu pandemic 1918

An estimated , Americans died of influenza during the pandemic, ten times as many as in the world war. Of the U. An estimated 43, servicemen mobilized for WWI died of influenza Crosby.

As noted in the Journal of the American Medical Association final edition of "The has gone: a year momentous as the termination of the most cruel war in the annals of the human race; a year which marked, the end at least for a time, of man's destruction of man; unfortunately a year in which developed a most fatal infectious disease causing the death of hundreds of thousands of human beings. Medical science for four and one-half years devoted itself to putting men on the firing line and keeping them there.

An Emergency Hospital for Influenza Patients. The effect of the influenza epidemic was so severe that the average life span in the US was depressed by 10 years. The influenza virus had a profound virulence, with a mortality rate at 2.

The death rate for 15 to year-olds of influenza and pneumonia were 20 times higher in than in previous years Taubenberger. People were struck with illness on the street and died rapid deaths. One anectode shared of was of four women playing bridge together late into the night. Overnight, three of the women died from influenza Hoagg. Others told stories of people on their way to work suddenly developing the flu and dying within hours Henig.

One physician writes that patients with seemingly ordinary influenza would rapidly "develop the most viscous type of pneumonia that has ever been seen" and later when cyanosis appeared in the patients, "it is simply a struggle for air until they suffocate," Grist, Another physician recalls that the influenza patients "died struggling to clear their airways of a blood-tinged froth that sometimes gushed from their nose and mouth," Starr, The physicians of the time were helpless against this powerful agent of influenza.

In children would skip rope to the rhyme Crawford :. I had a little bird, Its name was Enza. I opened the window, And in-flu-enza. The influenza pandemic circled the globe. Most of humanity felt the effects of this strain of the influenza virus. It spread following the path of its human carriers, along trade routes and shipping lines.

In India the mortality rate was extremely high at around 50 deaths from influenza per 1, people Brown. The Great War, with its mass movements of men in armies and aboard ships, probably aided in its rapid diffusion and attack. The origins of the deadly flu disease were unknown but widely speculated upon.

Some of the allies thought of the epidemic as a biological warfare tool of the Germans. Many thought it was a result of the trench warfare, the use of mustard gases and the generated "smoke and fumes" of the war. A national campaign began using the ready rhetoric of war to fight the new enemy of microscopic proportions. A study attempted to reason why the disease had been so devastating in certain localized regions, looking at the climate, the weather and the racial composition of cities.

They found humidity to be linked with more severe epidemics as it "fosters the dissemination of the bacteria," Committee on Atmosphere and Man, Meanwhile the new sciences of the infectious agents and immunology were racing to come up with a vaccine or therapy to stop the epidemics.

The experiences of people in military camps encountering the influenza pandemic:. An excerpt for the memoirs of a survivor at Camp Funston of the pandemic Survivor. A letter to a fellow physician describing conditions during the influenza epidemic at Camp Devens. A collection of letters of a soldier stationed in Camp Funston Soldier. The flu afflicted over 25 percent of the U. In one year, the average life expectancy in the United States dropped by 12 years.

It is an oddity of history that the influenza epidemic of has been overlooked in the teaching of American history. Documentation of the disease is ample, as shown in the records selected from the holdings of the National Archives regional archives.

Exhibiting these documents helps the epidemic take its rightful place as a major disaster in world history. Regional History from the National Archives. True or False? View the Documents and Photos. Mortality was high in people younger than 5 years old, years old, and 65 years and older. The high mortality in healthy people, including those in the year age group, was a unique feature of this pandemic. While the H1N1 virus has been synthesized and evaluated , the properties that made it so devastating are not well understood.

With no vaccine to protect against influenza infection and no antibiotics to treat secondary bacterial infections that can be associated with influenza infections, control efforts worldwide were limited to non-pharmaceutical interventions such as isolation, quarantine, good personal hygiene, use of disinfectants, and limitations of public gatherings, which were applied unevenly.

The H1N1 flu virus caused the deadliest pandemic of the 20th century. To better understand this deadly virus, an expert group of researchers and virus hunters set out to search for the lost virus, sequence its genome, recreate the virus in a highly safe and regulated laboratory setting at CDC, and ultimately study its secrets to better prepare for future pandemics. Skip directly to site content Skip directly to page options Skip directly to A-Z link.

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