The 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic
What the Avian Flu Could Become
The Spanish Flu began with a cough and muscle aches. It ended in death. Not in every case, but forty million of them ended that way.
Killed More Than WWI
In 1918, the world was at war with a deadly enemy. The war waged for about a year until the enemy retreated and hid but not before killing about forty million people or more than seven times the population of Maryland.
It was not World War I that killed all those people. It was the Spanish Flu. It was called Spanish Flu because its first noted appearance was in Spain, but it was simply 1918’s flu strain, a strain that happened to be deadly.
The problem with the flu virus is that it mutates and you are never sure of how virulent a flu you will wind up with. The SARS scare killed a few hundred people out of a worldwide population of four billion plus. Now imagine the terror people felt in 1918 about a flu that killed about or two-hundred-thousand times the number killed by SARS in a world that was half as populated.
How Deadly Was Spanish Flu?
Spanish Flu killed more people than were killed in World War I and in a shorter time frame, too, yet the war captured the headlines during 1918. It was estimated that six-hundred-and-seventy-five-thousand Americans died from the Spanish Flu or ten times more than died in the war.
Spanish Flu killed more people in one year than the Black Plague did in four years.
Spanish Flu was so devastating that human life span was reduced by ten years in 1918.
After one month in Philadelphia, the flu had killed nearly eleven thousand people, including almost eight hundred people on October 10, 1918.
One physician wrote that patients rapidly “develop the most vicious type of pneumonia that has ever been seen” and later when cyanosis appeared in patients “it is simply a struggle for air until they suffocate.” Another doctor said that the influenza patients “died struggling to clear their airways of a blood-tinged froth that sometimes gushed from their mouth and nose.”
Trying to Prevent the Flu
The reactions at the time were sometimes draconian. Washington, D.C. passed a law that it was illegal to appear outdoors. San Francisco and San Diego forced their citizens to wear gauze masks. Some towns required a signed certificate if someone wanted to enter the town.
One of the problems with combating the flu was that modern medicine was still in its infancy. People just didn’t know much about germ theory let alone viruses, which are even smaller. There was no real defense or treatment for the flu.
Crude vaccines or throat gargles were developed by straining blood and mucus from people who had survived the flu. The vaccines were injected into people’s arms. The gargles were sprayed in a person’s throat. Both had no effect.
It is the deadliest plague that has ever struck the world and yet, it remains largely forgotten either through the selective memories of the people who lived through it or because history books remember World War I and not the flu.
Whatever the reason, October 1918 remains the month that the world mourned.
Demonstration of Red Cross ambulance crew
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