Stories from a past pandemic: Readers write in about their ancestors’ experiences during the 1918 flu

‘A recent Scientific American feature explores how the catastrophic 1918 influenza pandemic seemed to quickly slip from public discourse. The event killed more than 50 million people worldwide, yet it takes up comparatively little space in society’s “collective memory.” The article considers, by analogy, how the current COVID-19 pandemic might be remembered by future generations. Scientific American accompanied the feature with a call for letters telling the stories of families affected by the 1918 crisis. Below are some examples of what we received.’

Read here (Scientific American, Jan 28, 2021)

It’s hard to enforce pandemic health rules on Halloween. Just look at what happened in 1918

‘Just as the state of the pandemic varied, so too did the precautions that cities took for Halloween. Newspaper articles in the digital archive of the Influenza Encyclopedia, produced by the Center for the History of Medicine at the University of Michigan, provide a glimpse at the range of Halloween safety protocols in major cities nationwide.

‘One thing they make clear: it’s already hard enough to enforce safety protocols on a day like Halloween, but that challenge gets even more intense during a pandemic.’

Read here (Time, Oct 28, 2020) 

Experts warn coronavirus may cause 'wave' of neurological conditions including Parkinson's disease

‘COVID-19 can cause worrying neurological symptoms like a loss of smell and taste, but Australian scientists are warning the damage the virus causes to the brain may also lead to more serious conditions such as Parkinson's disease.

‘It has happened before... Five years after the Spanish flu pandemic in the early 1900s, there was up to a three-fold increase in the incidence of Parkinson's disease. Kevin Barnham from the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health said he believed a similar "silent wave" of neurological illness would follow this pandemic. "Parkinson's disease is a complex illness, but one of the causes is inflammation, and the virus helps to drive that inflammation," he said.’

Read here (ABC News, Sept 23, 2020)

Demographic perspectives on the mortality of Covid-19 and other epidemics

‘With a hypothetical 1 million COVID-19 deaths [in the US], it is possible to portray the epidemic as unimaginably large—the biggest killer in American history—or small, reducing our remaining life [expectancy] by less than 1 part in 1,000. However, when the loss of life is put into comparative perspective, we see that the scale of an epidemic with 1 million deaths would be as large as that of the recent opioid and HIV crises but much smaller than that of the Spanish flu. The 1918 epidemic killed more people relative to population size, and it also caused a much greater loss of remaining life expectancy because those who died were so young.

‘As a society, we are and we should be making major and costly efforts to reduce mortality. The anticipated economic costs appear appropriate, or perhaps low, when compared to the statistical value of lives that may be saved.

‘The death toll of COVID-19 is a terrible thing, both for those who lose their lives and for their family, friends, colleagues, and all whom their lives touched. Those are real individuals, not the abstract statistics presented here. But the population perspective helps us to place this tragedy in a broader context. As we put our efforts into reducing the impact of the epidemic, it is important to know that we as a society have been through such mortality crises before.’

Read here (PNAS, Sept 8, 2020)

Why do some people weather coronavirus infection unscathed?

‘Asymptomatic cases are not unique to Covid-19. They occur with the regular flu, and probably also featured in the 1918 pandemic, according to epidemiologist Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London. But scientists aren’t sure why certain people weather Covid-19 unscathed. “That is a tremendous mystery at this point,” says Donald Thea, an infectious disease expert at Boston University’s School of Public Health...

‘Disease tolerance is the ability of an individual, due to a genetic predisposition or some aspect of behavior or lifestyle, to thrive despite being infected with an amount of pathogen that sickens others... At least 90 percent of those infected with the tuberculosis bacterium don’t get sick. The same is true for many of the 1.5 billion of people globally who live with parasitic worms called helminths in their intestines...

‘...there are countless disease tolerance pathways. “Every time we figure one out, we find we have 10 more things we don’t understand,” King says. Things will differ with each disease, he adds, “so that becomes a bit overwhelming.”

‘Nevertheless, a growing number of experts agree that disease tolerance research could have profound implications for treating infectious disease in the future. Microbiology and infectious disease research has “all been focused on the pathogen as an invader that has to be eliminated some way,” says virologist Jeremy Luban of the University of Massachusetts Medical School. And as Ayres makes clear, he says, “what we really should be thinking about is how do we keep the person from getting sick.”

Read here (Scientific American, August 25, 2020) 

WHO chief hopes coronavirus pandemic will last less than two years

‘The World Health Organization hopes the coronavirus pandemic will be shorter than the 1918 Spanish flu and last less than two years, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Friday, if the world unites and succeeds in finding a vaccine... Tedros said the 1918 Spanish flu “took two years to stop”... ...we have a disadvantage of globalisation, closeness, connectedness but an advantage of better technology.‘

Read here (Reuters, August 22, 2020)

The 1918 flu faded in our collective memory: We might ‘forget’ the coronavirus, too

‘This year is not the first time a new pandemic has prompted reexamination of the one in 1918. The 20th century saw two more flu pandemics, which occurred in 1957 and 1968. In both cases, “suddenly the memory of the Great Flu reoccurs,” Beiner says. “People begin looking for this precedent; people begin looking for the cure.” Likewise, during the avian flu scare in 2005 and the swine flu pandemic in 2009, Google searches worldwide for “Spanish flu” spiked (though both increases were dwarfed by the one that occurred this past March). All the while a growing body of historical research has been fleshing out the story of the 1918 flu, providing the foundation for a significant resurgence of its memory in the public sphere.’

Read here (Scientific American, August 13, 2020)