The Flu Epidemic F 1918

Walking down any given street in the year 1918 between the months of June and December, one would take notice of coffins lining the sidewalks. Nobody was on the streets, and dead bodies were stuffed into every available space. The Flu Epidemic of 1918 not only was the most devastating event of the twentieth century, but propelled the United States to search for a vaccine that has not yet been found, causing concern that the flu will strike again.

Influenza has been around almost as long as people have walked the earth. Its roots draw back as far as 412 B.C., when a man named Hippocrates wrote of an uncontrollable outbreak of a disease that closely resembles influenza. This pandemic devastated an entire Athenian army, and has since occurred approximately every one hundred years (Persico 30). However, in 1918, influenza was somewhat different. It became popularly known as the Spanish influenza. This is slightly a misnomer because although it became widely known in Spain during the spring of 1918, it had been noticed on British army bases in France in 1917 (Carter 18). This new virus became extremely deadly in a short amount of time. Nobody could form a good reason as to why it had appeared. Scientists hypothesized that it came from poison gases formed from exploding ammunition, decomposing bodies, and carbon dioxide from trenches, which fused together, forming a toxic vapor (Persico 81). Because it had swept upon the world so quickly, a cure was not available. The influenza of 1918 took people in a matter of days. A victim could be walking around feeling perfectly healthy one morning, be bedridden by nightfall, and have died before daybreak. Doctors were baffled, and gave vaccines that didn’t work. When one doctor was asked what the vaccine contained of, he said “the vaccines were just a soup made of blood and mucus of flu patients that had been filtered to get rid of large cells and debris” (Kolata 23).

This particular epidemic of influenza was proven to have existed before the breakout in Spain. It had made three waves during a two-year period. Each new assault became more infectious. Over twenty thousand people died in New York City alone, and the only country not affected, Australia, possesses strict quarantine regulations (Is another influenza pandemic coming soon?, 1997). The epidemic passed th...

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... air and into the lungs of innocent people, and it is coming back. Scientists are working to find a cure, and are on the verge of a breakthrough, however they hope it will come in time. The world is not ready for another epidemic with the death rates of 1918. If it occurs before a vaccine is produced, human population will cease to exist.

Works Cited

Carter, Joseph. 1918 Year of Crisis, Year of Change. Toronto: Prentice Hall of Canada, Ltd. 1968.

“Is another influenza pandemic coming soon?” Infectious Disease News. May 1997: SLACK Incorporated. 10Jan. 2001

<http://www.slackinc.com/general/idn/199705/pandemic.htm>

Kolata, Gina. Flu. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1999.

Persico, Joseph E. American Heritage. Vol XXVII Dec. 1975-Oct. 1975. New York, NY: American Heritage Publishing Co., Inc. 1975.

Sternberg, S. “A Doughboy’s Lungs Yield 1918 Flu Virus.” Science News Online. 22 March 1997: Science Service. 4 Jan. 2001.

<http://www.sciencenews.org/sh_arc97/3_22_97/fobl.htm>