The 1918 Flu Pandemic

From here the process set fire and spread across Europe, curing many, but also killing them too. This new discovery opened a channel of research for many doctors, until in 1774 a farmer named Benjamin Jesty discovered that the lesser illness of cowpox could vaccinate one from smallpox. Jesty’s discovery plagued the world and set another opening for research, into which doctors searched for the best way to vaccinate citizens with. Vaccination helped a plethora of people until 1980 when the disease was finally eradicated. However, smallpox’s ugly face reared itself just recently with the new threat of bioterrorism.

The first scientist to claim to solve the enigma of influenza was Dr. Friedrich Johann Pfeiffer. He isolated a bacterium he named Hemophilus influenzae from the respiratory tract of those who had the flu in the pandemic of 1890. He was believed to be correct in his discovery until the pandemic of 1918, when scientists searched the respiratory tracts of influenza victims and only sometimes found his bacterium. Robert E. Shope and his mentor Paul Lewis were the next to attempt to crack the code of influenza. They chose to study the disease in pigs, a controversial choice because many people believed that the swine influenza pigs were contracting was not the same as the human flu.

Influenza is defined as an acute, commonly epidemic disease, occurring in several forms, caused by numerous rapidly mutating viral strains and characterized by respiratory symptoms and general prostration. Spanish flu was more than just a normal epidemic, it was a pandemic. Epidemics affect many people at the same time in areas where the disease doesn’t normally occur. A pandemic is an epidemic on a national, international, or global scale. The Spanish flu was different from the seasonal flu in one especially frightening way, there was an unusually high death rate among healthy adults aged 15 to 34 and lowered the life expectancy by more than ten years.

Individuals who were unfortunate enough to come in contact with the contents of the protein casing generally developed severe respiratory inflammation, as the Immune system’s own response towards the infected lung cells would destroy much of the lungs, thus causing the lungs to flood with fluids. Due to this flooding, pneumonia was a common cause of death for those infected with Spanish Flu. Due its genetic similarity with Avian Flu, the Spanish Flu is thought to be descended from Avian Flu which is commonly known as “Bird Flu.” (Billings,1997) The Spanish Flu of 1918 has had a larger impact in terms of global significance than any other disease has had because it was the most deadly, easily transmitted across the entire globe, and occurred in an ideal time period for a disease to happen. However it is rationalized, fifty million people, thirty million people, and even twenty million people is an enormously huge a... ... middle of paper ... ...ll pandemics. Emerg Infect Dis.

While some countries see the impacts of tuberculosis less than others, the threat of this infectious disease looms across the horizon. Today, this organism affects one third of the population and is one of the most threatening of infectious diseases (NIAID, 2001). The BCG vaccine (Bacillus of Calmette and Guerin), is administrated in many high risk countries to combat the disease. Although scientists have improved the vaccine throughout the nineteenth century and the vaccine helps to combat some tuberculosis, its prevention is still far from perfect. The BCG vaccine is formed from a live strain of Mycobacterium bovis (WHO, 2005).

I will argue that the nature of this missing data combined with the biology of the virus itself could explain a fascinating phenomenon that cropped up in the infection rate data for the 1918 influenza, that despite significantly poorer living conditions, African-Americans were significantly less likely to contract the virus or die from it. The Spanish Influenza pandemic that ravaged the world came in two waves; the first during the spring of 1918 was relatively mild. The second wave began in the fall of 1918 and is the better remembered and far more virulent strain that killed millions (Figure 2). Although the virus returned for an encore in 1920 the new strain was attenuated and the population had a high level of resistance so relatively few individuals died (Crosby, 1989). Figure 1.

Due to the lack of preparation and knowledge of technology in 1918, the plague was easily transmitted throughout the United States at a rapid speed, threatening the lives of numerous citizens. Because it caused such a widespread of fear and sickness among the American public, it encouraged scientists and physicians to discover a cure to prevent more deaths. Upon searching for the initial cause of the plague and the cure for it, which was critical to avoid spreading and causing further harm, it influenced newer technology to be created helping prevent a similar outbreak in the future. There are many theories as to how the plague initially began. It is widely believed that the influenza originally started in Asia, since many pandemics prior to 1918 began in the Asian region.

to the famous Black Death in 1346, people from all over the world have been caught in chaos with insufficient treatments and no reliable way of preventing this horrible disease from spreading. Today, vast medical advancements have yielded successful treatments for the plague, but people are still highly susceptible to widespread disaster if a bioterrorist attack does manage to occur. In 430-26 B.C. during the Peloponnesian War, which was fought between Sparta and Athens, overcrowded conditions in the cities allowed plague to spread quickly. It claimed tens of thousands of victims including Pericles, the former leader of Athens.

Killing over 40 million in less than a year, the H1N1 strain ingrained a deep and lasting fear of the virus throughout the world. Though 1957 and 1968 brought on milder pandemics, they still killed an estimated 3 million people and presented a new problem of vaccine manufacturing and production. The new avian flu in Asia now claiming 54 lives has the world rushing to find a vaccine and prevent another, even more deadly pandemic Influenza is a pathogenic virus that has been the cause deadly pandemics throughout recorded history. Influenza is caused by an A or B virus, the more deadly of the two is influenza A which derives from the avian species and initiates pandemics in the human population (Levison, 2004). The genomes in influenza viruses are divided into eight parts of RNA.

One of these scourges was smallpox, a highly infectious and deadly disease that causes boils to sprout on the entire body. Once endemic to the entire world, it has been wiped out with mass vaccination efforts by the World Health Organization with the last reported case being in 1977 in Somalia (Tucker 118). The threat of the virus still looms over us, however, with the advent of the age of terrorism. Its transmission method (human to human), the lack of effective treatment, its high mortality rate, and its ease of weaponization has compelled the Centers for Disease Control to classify it as a Category A bioterrorist agent with the highest potential for use as a weapon against civilians (Ryan 41). The smallpox disease is caused by the Variola virus, a virus of the Orthopox family, which also includes cowpox, monkeypox, and other related diseases (Tucker 5).