Speaker 1: Happy Saturday, everybody. Over the last few weeks, we have
Speaker 1: understandably gotten several requests to talk about the nineteen eighteen
Speaker 1: flu pandemic. That is a topic we covered back on
Speaker 1: May twelve, and we are re airing it today. We
Speaker 1: gotta make a couple of clarifications. In this episode. We
Speaker 1: say that public health officials recommended that people wear masks
Speaker 1: to protect them from contracting the disease, and that this
Speaker 1: was completely ineffective. That is true, but we should note
Speaker 1: that if a person is ill, the right mask worn't
Speaker 1: correctly can help them from infecting other people. Also, from
Speaker 1: time to time, folks who find this old episode in
Speaker 1: the archived have written in to say that the pandemic
Speaker 1: starting point was in Fort Riley, Kansas. That is one
Speaker 1: of the potential starting points for this pandemic, but there
Speaker 1: are other possibilities as well, which are discussed in the
Speaker 1: episode Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class production
Speaker 1: of My Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry and Holly
Speaker 1: so we don't normally start out with corrections. Very first
Speaker 1: thing that I need to do that today, Okay, So
Speaker 1: you remember our our pig war episode where we talked about, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, a war that almost happened because of a
Speaker 1: pig I do. I accidentally said in that episode that
Speaker 1: somebody traveled via the Panama Canal to get out to
Speaker 1: that part of the world. Ye, so that was wrong.
Speaker 1: It was a little whoopsie daisy. That was yes, that
Speaker 1: was my source said via Panama, and my dumb brain
Speaker 1: just filled in the part that says canal there. The
Speaker 1: canal did not exist yet. I'm very sorry. Please stop
Speaker 1: emailing us about here's what I'm saying. If that's the
Speaker 1: worst crime you commit, I think we're in pretty good hands.
Speaker 1: I know. I think this is maybe like that was
Speaker 1: maybe the second hugest, most email generating error in the podcast.
Speaker 1: And I'm not even going to mention what the other
Speaker 1: wood was because we haven't gotten a message about it
Speaker 1: and maybe six months, and it's from years before we
Speaker 1: came on the show, like you're still getting corrections about
Speaker 1: it when we started. So yes, I am so sorry
Speaker 1: that I auto completed something that was not built yet
Speaker 1: in the world. Uh. And I'll try not to do
Speaker 1: that again. And today we're gonna talk about something completely different, Yes,
Speaker 1: so just not long ago at all. We asked on
Speaker 1: Facebook for people to tell us some ideas of things
Speaker 1: that they wanted to talk about that were events in history,
Speaker 1: because we have lots of episodes about people, and some
Speaker 1: people prefer events, and for whatever reason, whatever I sit
Speaker 1: down to do the podcast, my brain turns up people
Speaker 1: a lot of because to you so weird. Even if
Speaker 1: I try to pick a subject that is not a
Speaker 1: people and is an event eventually sort of as the
Speaker 1: notes and the plotline or kind of playing out as
Speaker 1: I'm doing my research, it almost always had the focusing
Speaker 1: on one particular person that was part of it. I
Speaker 1: don't know if that's just some sort of brain situation
Speaker 1: that it wants to focus on one smaller piece or what,
Speaker 1: but it happens. It's tricky to pick an event and
Speaker 1: not do that for me. Well, conveniently, the event that
Speaker 1: people asked for the absolute most was the wreck of
Speaker 1: the Batavia, which at that point we had already recorded
Speaker 1: and edited and it was just waiting to be published.
Speaker 1: So that worked out really well. We delivered so quickly
Speaker 1: without meeting to you. I know. We had a couple
Speaker 1: of other things that were maybe not quite as much
Speaker 1: as heavily requested at that one, but extremely frequently requested.
Speaker 1: And one of them is what we're going to talk
Speaker 1: about today, which is the so called Spanish flu epidemic
Speaker 1: of nineteen eighteen and nineteen nineteen. So somewhere between twenty
Speaker 1: million and fifty million people died of the flu during
Speaker 1: this epidemic, which started just as World War One was
Speaker 1: winding down. So a lot of our past episodes that
Speaker 1: are about diseases are really about the people who saved
Speaker 1: us from them. So like our smallpox episode is all
Speaker 1: about Edward Jenner and his smallpox vaccine, and our tuberculosis
Speaker 1: episode is all about Salmon Watsman and Albert shots and
Speaker 1: the discovery of streptomycin, which was the first antibiotic that
Speaker 1: could treat it. Sarah and Deblina's episode called Polio the
Speaker 1: Dread Disease is also largely about the vaccines that have
Speaker 1: nearly eradicated polio from the world, but the story of
Speaker 1: the flu pandemic of eighteen and nineteen nineteen is not
Speaker 1: that has a lot more in common with our episode
Speaker 1: about encephalitis lethargica, which also happened right about the same
Speaker 1: time the flu epidemic is probably why a disease that
Speaker 1: was as crazy and terrifying as as encephalitis lethargic is
Speaker 1: not a better known event in medical history. Uh. The
Speaker 1: flu just completely overshadowed it because it killed so many people.
Speaker 1: But like encephalita lethargica, the pandemic flu came and it went.
Speaker 1: Nobody could treat it, nobody could cure it. A fifth
Speaker 1: of the people in the world got the flu that
Speaker 1: during the pandemic, and UH. Usually, while the typical flu
Speaker 1: is hardest on elderly people and the very young, this
Speaker 1: time it was deadliest among twenty year olds, and in
Speaker 1: that age bracket. It was so lethal that in the
Speaker 1: United States, for example, the average life expectancy dropped by
Speaker 1: more than a decade just as a result of how
Speaker 1: many people died from the flu, which is scary. I
Speaker 1: feel like I should confess that I have this completely
Speaker 1: unfounded fear that I will die of a random flu.
Speaker 1: This is also why we are doing the episode now
Speaker 1: and not at the height of flu season, as we're
Speaker 1: exiting flu season. I mean, every time I get the flu,
Speaker 1: my thought is this is the one that's gonna take
Speaker 1: me down. So UM, hopefully I won't have any panic
Speaker 1: attacks while we record. Yeah, I will keep my fingers.
Speaker 1: So before we start, though, we should talk a little
Speaker 1: bit about what the world of medicine and what public
Speaker 1: health were like in nineteen eighteen. So in many parts
Speaker 1: of the world, nations hadn't really standardized or regulated what
Speaker 1: was required for a person to call themselves a doctor,
Speaker 1: so people practiced medicine with all kinds of different credentials
Speaker 1: or with no credentials, and patent medicines which really didn't
Speaker 1: have any medical value. And we're mostly alcohol and ladana
Speaker 1: most of the time, we're still pretty prevalent. There was
Speaker 1: a lot of stuff floating around that was just not
Speaker 1: legitimate for treating anything. And at this point, Alexander Fleming
Speaker 1: had not yet discovered penicillin. That was still a decade away,
Speaker 1: and its use as a drug was even further out
Speaker 1: than that. So penicillin wouldn't have helped fight the flu,
Speaker 1: since influenza is a virus and penicillin kills bacteria, but
Speaker 1: it might have helped some of the people who wound
Speaker 1: up with bacterial pneumonia after contracting the flu. And this
Speaker 1: is more just to sort of point out a milestone
Speaker 1: of where we were in medicine when this flu epidemic
Speaker 1: was happening. Yeah, So, in spite of some of these
Speaker 1: things that we think of as basics today, like requiring
Speaker 1: people to be trained to call themselves doctors and antibiotics
Speaker 1: and things like that, things had really advanced a lot
Speaker 1: in the world of medicine over the past century. Before
Speaker 1: the epidemics started. Most parts of the industrialized world at
Speaker 1: this point had understood and accepted the germ theory of disease.
Speaker 1: So at this point pretty much everyone was on the
Speaker 1: same page in most places, uh that germs caused disease,
Speaker 1: and doctors had also figured out exactly which germs caused
Speaker 1: a number of diseases, including tuberculosis, malaria, and cholera. The
Speaker 1: idea of a reportable disease are one so dangerous that
Speaker 1: all cases of it needed to be reported to government
Speaker 1: authorities also existed. But even though there had been another
Speaker 1: serious flu epidemic a couple of decades before, influenza wasn't
Speaker 1: really really portable in most places until this particular epidemic
Speaker 1: had really gotten dire, and at that point it was
Speaker 1: too late for warning the government to do really any good. Yeah,
Speaker 1: what they already knew there was a big problem. By
Speaker 1: the time people were able to start saying, hey, there's
Speaker 1: a big problem, vaccines also existed. There was a vaccine
Speaker 1: for smallpox, there was a vaccine for rabies. Other vaccines
Speaker 1: were also in the works, and people really thought as
Speaker 1: the as the epidemic got going that a vaccine for
Speaker 1: the flu was just around the corner. As we talked
Speaker 1: about in the Encephalitis lethargica episode, though, figuring out how
Speaker 1: to make a vaccine for a disease when you don't
Speaker 1: know what's causing the disease is really hard, and not
Speaker 1: only did doctors not know what was causing the flu,
Speaker 1: they also had it panned on a completely different germ.
Speaker 1: They thought it had a totally different cause than it
Speaker 1: really did have. So at the start of the epidemic,
Speaker 1: the purported culprit for the flu was a bacterium that
Speaker 1: had been named Fifer's basilius after its discoverer, who was
Speaker 1: a German scientist named Robert Friedrich Pfeiffer, and he made
Speaker 1: the connection between his Baxillus and the flu, but he
Speaker 1: hadn't really proved this connection, and as the epidemic war on,
Speaker 1: it became abundantly clear that Phifer was wrong. The baxillus
Speaker 1: he discovered was not present in sick patients, and deliberately
Speaker 1: exposing people to it didn't give them the flu. So
Speaker 1: even though an international team was dedicated to trying to
Speaker 1: create a vaccine, none of their work proved effective, and
Speaker 1: at first they were after the wrong germ, and then
Speaker 1: they didn't have a good starting point. So all of
Speaker 1: this together combines to mean that when the flu turned
Speaker 1: really deadly in nineteen eighteen, there was not much that
Speaker 1: legitimate doctors could do for their patients besides to keep
Speaker 1: them in bed and keep them as fed and hydrated
Speaker 1: and comfortable as possible. The most most of the things
Speaker 1: that had any efficacy at all were about prevention, which
Speaker 1: basically involved keeping the sick people quarantined and trying to
Speaker 1: educate people about how to keep themselves from being exposed.
Speaker 1: And doctors knew that the flu was spread by coughing
Speaker 1: and sneezing, so they gave the common sense advice about
Speaker 1: covering your nose and mouth and staying away from people
Speaker 1: who were coughing and sneezing. Oh and also telling people
Speaker 1: not to spit on the ground, so don't spit on
Speaker 1: the ground, please. You know, their debates over whether that's
Speaker 1: a civil way to behave in general. But uh, sick
Speaker 1: people don't spread no spitting. It's gross and it spreads illness.
Speaker 1: So there were also a lot of public health campaigns
Speaker 1: that were trying to get people who were sick to
Speaker 1: stay at home, which probably sounds kind of familiar to
Speaker 1: when there's a big flu outbreak today. Uh. They especially,
Speaker 1: we're trying to educate people who were sick to get
Speaker 1: them to stay away from crowds. And businesses got in
Speaker 1: on the deal to trying to warn people who were
Speaker 1: ill to go home. So a sign at one theater
Speaker 1: in Chicago read, influenza frequently complicated with pneumonia is prevalent
Speaker 1: at this time throughout America. This theater is cooperating with
Speaker 1: the Department of Health. You must do the same. If
Speaker 1: you have a cold and are coughing and sneezing, do
Speaker 1: not enter this theater. And then in all capital letters,
Speaker 1: go home and go to bed until you are well.
Speaker 1: That seems wise. Not all of the advice on prevention
Speaker 1: was sound, though. Many people in public health recommended that
Speaker 1: people wear masks, and some places even required that masks
Speaker 1: be worn by law, but this was in fact not effective. Yeah,
Speaker 1: masks are kind of effective when there's bacteria involved, but
Speaker 1: when it's a virus, the viruses are just too small.
Speaker 1: Before we get into how this disease spread and where
Speaker 1: it was first reported and all that, let's take a
Speaker 1: brief moment for a word from a sponsor, So back
Speaker 1: to exactly what happened when this disease made its debut.
Speaker 1: The first reports of flu in this pandemic came in
Speaker 1: May of nineteen eighteen in Europe, and the first reports
Speaker 1: were amongst soldiers, so large numbers of otherwise healthy young
Speaker 1: troops were just becoming really ill with flu like symptoms.
Speaker 1: So they were getting coughing and sneezing and body aches.
Speaker 1: Most of them were recovering within a few days, and
Speaker 1: apart from the fact that this was disrupting a war,
Speaker 1: it was not a really big deal. But then the
Speaker 1: disease jumped from the military to civilians in Europe, and
Speaker 1: from there it spread to most of the rest of
Speaker 1: the world over the course of just a couple of months.
Speaker 1: It was still a relatively mild disease, much like the
Speaker 1: seasonal flu. Most of us have had at one time
Speaker 1: or another in our lives. It wasn't pleasant, but it
Speaker 1: was also not especially alarming. This disease faded away later
Speaker 1: in the summer, but then in August it mutated and
Speaker 1: became really a lot more serious. This terrifying strain of
Speaker 1: the flu was reported in Boston, Massachusetts, in the United States,
Speaker 1: in Freetown, Sierra Leone, and then Breast, France. And these
Speaker 1: were all ports cities, so it's possible that the disease
Speaker 1: had spread between three of them on ships, and this time,
Speaker 1: along with the typical flu symptoms of coughing and sneezing
Speaker 1: and a sore throat and body aches, the disease caused
Speaker 1: very high fevers between a hundred and two and a
Speaker 1: hundred five degrees Fahrenheim. Patients felt exhausted and their eyes
Speaker 1: became bloodshot, and some even had severe nosebleeds or gastro
Speaker 1: intestinal problems. Even though this flu was a lot worse
Speaker 1: from the flu that had spread earlier in the spring,
Speaker 1: a lot of people still recovered, but a pretty substantial
Speaker 1: portion of people developed a devastating pneumonia, which was caused
Speaker 1: by one of a number of bacteria. It was a
Speaker 1: secondary infection that was like a complication of this flu.
Speaker 1: Their lungs filled up with fluid and started hemorrhaging, and
Speaker 1: death often came alarmingly fast, with people going from sitting
Speaker 1: upright and talking to being dead within hours. See these
Speaker 1: are the stories that make me paranoid about the flu.
Speaker 1: This is this is why I read an article when
Speaker 1: I was working on this about that episode of the
Speaker 1: about the flu pandemic that was in the Down n
Speaker 1: Abbey TV show. Yeah, so spoiler alert for Down n Abbey.
Speaker 1: It's similarly, uh, make some people in the household really
Speaker 1: really sick, and it has one There's one particular character
Speaker 1: who goes from being she's sick, She's has she has
Speaker 1: the flu. She goes from I'm sick with the flu
Speaker 1: two I'm dead end an episode which is not uncommon
Speaker 1: for TV, but also was really how it worked. So
Speaker 1: when doctors performed autopsies on these patients who had died,
Speaker 1: they found that their lungs and their spleens were just
Speaker 1: grotesquely swollen. So a description from a doctor who was
Speaker 1: stationed at Fort Devan's outside Boston from that September, here's
Speaker 1: what he had to say. This epidemic started about four
Speaker 1: weeks ago and has developed so rapidly that the camp
Speaker 1: is demoralized and all ordinary work is held up till
Speaker 1: it has passed. These men start with what appears to
Speaker 1: be an ordinary attack of la grippa or influenza, and
Speaker 1: when brought to the hosp so abbreviation for hospital. When
Speaker 1: brought to the hosp they very rapidly developed the most
Speaker 1: viscus type of pneumonia that has ever been seen. Two
Speaker 1: hours after admission they have the mahogany spots over the cheekbones,
Speaker 1: and a few hours later you can begin to see
Speaker 1: the cyanosis extending from their ears and spreading all over
Speaker 1: the face, until it is hard to distinguish the colored
Speaker 1: men from the white. It is only a matter of
Speaker 1: a few hours then until death comes, and it is
Speaker 1: simply a struggle for air until they suffocate. It is horrible.
Speaker 1: One can stand to see one, two, or twenty men die,
Speaker 1: but to see these poor devils dropping like flies sort
Speaker 1: of gets on your nerves. We have been averaging about
Speaker 1: one deaths per day and and still keeping it up.
Speaker 1: There is no doubt in my mind that there is
Speaker 1: a new mixed infection here. But what I don't know,
Speaker 1: and from the port cities where this really started sort
Speaker 1: of blossoming outward, the disease spread really rapidly over the
Speaker 1: next couple of months. It's spread all over the world,
Speaker 1: and then it too faded out, although another mild wave
Speaker 1: of flu went on around early nine It's hard to
Speaker 1: pinpoint exactly how many people died during the pandemic. Medical
Speaker 1: records from the era were already kind of sketchy even
Speaker 1: before you threw a devastating pandemic into the mix. To
Speaker 1: make things even more chaotic, doctors often misdiagnosed milder forms
Speaker 1: of the flu is common colds, and sometimes they diagnosed
Speaker 1: this much more serious version as another disease entirely like cholera.
Speaker 1: The disease also moved so quickly that public health agencies
Speaker 1: could not accurately track what was happening. So in the
Speaker 1: decade after the pandemic, the estimated global death toll was
Speaker 1: twenty million people, but modern researchers who have gone back
Speaker 1: and tried to reconstruct things have marked the number as
Speaker 1: much higher, Between thirty million and fifty million people died worldwide,
Speaker 1: So that sort of leaves us to wonder why this
Speaker 1: particular flu was so incredibly bad. Uh. We know that
Speaker 1: the war often takes a giant share of the blame
Speaker 1: for the spread of the flu pandemic, And it's definitely
Speaker 1: true that the flu followed the troops and that it
Speaker 1: spread like wildfire amongst soldiers in close quarters, and the
Speaker 1: soldiers returning home from the war brought the disease with them.
Speaker 1: Battlefield injuries and other illnesses also made it harder for
Speaker 1: soldiers to fight off the flu, so camps for the
Speaker 1: war were basically like flu incubators. It's also definitely true
Speaker 1: that the war meant that a lot of the medical
Speaker 1: personnel who were trained at the time had been tasked
Speaker 1: to help with the military, and so they were not
Speaker 1: available to help the civilian population. As the epidemics started
Speaker 1: to spread, communities in more rural areas asked their various
Speaker 1: government organizations to please send doctors and nurses to help them,
Speaker 1: but often the few who weren't part of the war
Speaker 1: effort fell victim to the flu themselves while they were
Speaker 1: traveling to their patients. But it really it wasn't just
Speaker 1: about the soldiers or the effects of the war. Even
Speaker 1: if the epidemic had happened during peacetime. Hospitals just wouldn't
Speaker 1: have been able to handle the influx of so many patients.
Speaker 1: Temporary hospitals had to be built in churches and schools
Speaker 1: and community centers, and some hospitals even expanded their capacity
Speaker 1: by housing their patients intents on hospital grounds. And the
Speaker 1: way of life in the late nineteen teens also played
Speaker 1: a big role in the spread of the disease. Cars
Speaker 1: were not in widespread use at this point, and many
Speaker 1: larger cities around the world had developed extensive public transportation systems,
Speaker 1: so that was bringing sick and healthy people into contact
Speaker 1: with each other on street cars, on trolleys, and on subways.
Speaker 1: And several parts of the world people were also traveling
Speaker 1: really extensively by train, so, for example, in the United States,
Speaker 1: train travel peaked in nineteen twenty, just a year after
Speaker 1: the epidemic, and these long trips in close quarters similarly,
Speaker 1: UH fueled the spread of the disease. Some of the
Speaker 1: most popular leisure activities in nineteen eighteen and nineteen nineteen
Speaker 1: also drew big crowds. So movie theaters had become affordable,
Speaker 1: they were extremely popular, and they were very widespread. They
Speaker 1: were everywhere, and that made them a hotbed of infection. UH.
Speaker 1: There were also dance halls and amusement parks, and in
Speaker 1: many places governments restricted activities or shut them down entirely
Speaker 1: to try to keep people from gathering. Some towns even
Speaker 1: canceled school UH and canceled church services, and universities suspended
Speaker 1: their operations in an effort to just sort of stop
Speaker 1: this spread that was going on everywhere people gathered. Cities
Speaker 1: also shut down or restricted their public transport Asian systems
Speaker 1: that were at this point so popular, and drivers, either
Speaker 1: with their city's authority or acting on their own, would
Speaker 1: refuse to carry passengers who weren't wearing masks or who
Speaker 1: they suspected to be ill. And although all of these
Speaker 1: factors have been about industry, people in rural and developing
Speaker 1: areas were not spared in the least in the United States,
Speaker 1: the Eskimo population was disproportionately hit with the flu, and
Speaker 1: in rural and developing areas, people were left with no
Speaker 1: medical care and very little reliable information about what was
Speaker 1: actually going on or what they could possibly do about it.
Speaker 1: The lore, which took so much of the blame for
Speaker 1: spreading the disease wound up ultimately killing sixty million people,
Speaker 1: but that number was just dwarfed by the total death
Speaker 1: toll from the flu. So before we talk about the
Speaker 1: aftermath of of this devastation, let's take another brief moment
Speaker 1: and have a word from a sponsor, so to to
Speaker 1: get back to the aftermath of this this flu pandemic.
Speaker 1: On top of the astounding loss of life, the flu
Speaker 1: pandemic had a lot of economic and social impacts. So
Speaker 1: many people were sick that public and municipal services completely
Speaker 1: shut down because there was nobody left to do the work.
Speaker 1: Garbage was piling up in the streets in cities were
Speaker 1: sanitation workers were particularly hard hit. Telegraph systems failed when
Speaker 1: there were not enough operators that were healthy enough to
Speaker 1: come into work. Kind of reminds me of stories about
Speaker 1: the Black Death and how so many people would die
Speaker 1: that there was no one left to bury them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: small businesses went bankrupt because their proprietors became too sick
Speaker 1: to work or they died. And then insurance companies also
Speaker 1: went bankrupt because their incoming claims skyrocketed. If trains were
Speaker 1: found to have sick people aboard stations along the routes
Speaker 1: would actually forbid them from stopping, so even the ones
Speaker 1: that we're working were subject to some you know, limitation then,
Speaker 1: and then that trickled down with its own effects of
Speaker 1: people not being able to get to where they needed
Speaker 1: to go. The public was also often really genuinely panicked,
Speaker 1: and governments took steps to try to maintain calm, including
Speaker 1: trying to filter or suppress information about the pandemic. So
Speaker 1: the telegraph was one of the primary modes of communication
Speaker 1: at this point. The telephone had been invented, but it
Speaker 1: was still extremely expensive, not at all prevalent in places
Speaker 1: that weren't very affluent or places that were rural, so
Speaker 1: a lot of people were relying completely on the telegraph
Speaker 1: to communicate with people over long distances. Telegraphs ran on
Speaker 1: a network of human operators who were privy to everything
Speaker 1: that was being transmitted because they were the ones that
Speaker 1: were sending out the codes. So in the United States,
Speaker 1: for example, the Public Health Service gave all of its
Speaker 1: officers codebooks to use anytime they were sending information about
Speaker 1: the pandemic. So the tele the telegraph operators wouldn't be
Speaker 1: able to figure out what was being said and go
Speaker 1: spread an alarm among other people, and once it was
Speaker 1: all over, perhaps because it had been so terrifying, and
Speaker 1: perhaps because it came on the heels of a war
Speaker 1: that had stretched on for years, most people really just
Speaker 1: seemed to want to forget that the whole thing had happened,
Speaker 1: and so for a long time, research into its cause
Speaker 1: and its progression were actually quite minimal. In October of
Speaker 1: nineteen eighteen, so as the epidemic was still going on,
Speaker 1: doctors began to correctly theorize that the flu was caused
Speaker 1: by a virus and not a bacteria, But influenza A
Speaker 1: virus wasn't isolated until many years later, in nineteen thirty three.
Speaker 1: Influenza A is what causes most epidemic strains of the
Speaker 1: flu to other types. Influenza B and C weren't isolated
Speaker 1: until nineteen forty and nineteen fifty, respectively, and the vaccine
Speaker 1: didn't come around until nineteen forty four. And because the
Speaker 1: flu mutates every year, the vaccine has to change every
Speaker 1: year to keep up. This is why the vaccine provides
Speaker 1: better action some years than others, because some years it's
Speaker 1: just a better match to what's actually happening, and it
Speaker 1: keeps up with the mutation right. Other, although less deadly
Speaker 1: pandemics also followed in nineteen fifty seven and fifty eight,
Speaker 1: and then again in nineteen sixty eight and sixty nine.
Speaker 1: There was also the H one and one swine flu
Speaker 1: pandemic in two thousand nine, and other flu seasons have
Speaker 1: also had the potential to turn into pandemic flu, but
Speaker 1: ultimately didn't. Scientists continue to study the nineteen eighteen nineteen
Speaker 1: nineteen pandemic to try to figure out exactly what made
Speaker 1: it so bad in the hopes of preventing another UH
Speaker 1: similar situation in the future. They've done things like tried
Speaker 1: to reverse engineer the genes of the nineteen eighteen version
Speaker 1: of the flu and try to figure out what modern
Speaker 1: drugs might be effective against something like that. In two
Speaker 1: thousand five, researchers sequenced the genome of the flu virus.
Speaker 1: They used samples from the body of an Inuit woman
Speaker 1: who had been buried in a mass grave after the
Speaker 1: flu killed nine of her village, and according to this research,
Speaker 1: the flu came from an H one and one avian virus.
Speaker 1: The sort of scientific verdict since then has flipped back
Speaker 1: and forth a little about whether the pandemic flu came
Speaker 1: from an avian or a swine origin, And then in
Speaker 1: February of UH, an article published in the journal Nature
Speaker 1: put the primary theory back to being an avian origin.
Speaker 1: In January of historian Mark Humphreys published a paper in
Speaker 1: the journal War in History theorizing a potential cause for
Speaker 1: the pandemic. During World War One, ninety six thousand Chinese
Speaker 1: workers were transported by rail to work on the Western Front.
Speaker 1: He found medical records describing a respiratory virus that broke
Speaker 1: out in southern China the year before, one that Chinese
Speaker 1: officials later said was identical to the so called Spanish flu.
Speaker 1: About three thousand of the workers were quarantined with flu
Speaker 1: like symptom. Racist doctors called the sick workers lazy and
Speaker 1: then sent them back to their camps. And at the
Speaker 1: time of his papers publication, he was waiting on test
Speaker 1: results from samples for confirmation. Yeah, this is one of
Speaker 1: those things where, at least according to everything that I
Speaker 1: was reading about it, UH, tests should confirm this theory.
Speaker 1: But at this point a lot of people are like, yeah,
Speaker 1: that makes a lot of sense. Um, So obviously that
Speaker 1: means that this had nothing really to do with Spain.
Speaker 1: We've left this for the end that the name Spanish
Speaker 1: flu only came about because Spain's press was uncensored at
Speaker 1: the time, so most of the earliest information that people
Speaker 1: got about the illness came from Spain, where people weren't
Speaker 1: restricting the information that was published about it. So it
Speaker 1: really got its unfortunate uh association, just by the fact
Speaker 1: that they were the most informative and they were really
Speaker 1: there being the least obfuscating about what was happening. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: this whole story is really alarming to me. I have,
Speaker 1: or I had when I was young. I had a
Speaker 1: living great grandfather who was born in nine and so
Speaker 1: things didn't seem like they were in the distant past
Speaker 1: to me until they had happened before he had been born.
Speaker 1: So when I was little, the fact that this whole
Speaker 1: thing had happened while he was alive, I was like,
Speaker 1: this could happen again right now because that is in
Speaker 1: the extremely recent past. And now as an adult, I
Speaker 1: still think this could really happen again right now, But
Speaker 1: it's not because of like the state of medical knowledge
Speaker 1: is just because viruses can be terrifying. Yeah, like I said,
Speaker 1: I have a completely irrational level of fear of the flu.
Speaker 1: I don't know why. I don't know where that came from.
Speaker 1: It's just it's irrational. Exercise caution, Wash'd say my level
Speaker 1: of fear of it is irrational. Okay, that that maybe
Speaker 1: maybe I could say this thing I won't overshare. But
Speaker 1: last week I had a brief visit from food poisoning,
Speaker 1: and I immediately my brain started whirling with that, Oh
Speaker 1: my gosh, no, what if this is some really terrible
Speaker 1: version of the flu and I will be patient zero.
Speaker 1: It's irrational. Yeah, I think the thing that's made me
Speaker 1: most afraid of illnesses like this is a game that
Speaker 1: I've played on the iPad called Plague Incorporated, where basically
Speaker 1: you try to make your plague kill everyone in the world,
Speaker 1: and like, there's there are ways you can do it
Speaker 1: where it just basically spreads silently among everyone and then
Speaker 1: it turns completely deadly. And whenever I see that happen,
Speaker 1: I'm like that that could happen. It could really happen.
Speaker 1: I like how your entertainment choices are reinforcing your fears.
Speaker 1: That's really good. Sometimes that's what happens. Yes, thank you
Speaker 1: so much. For joining us today for this Saturday classic.
Speaker 1: If you have heard any kind of email address or
Speaker 1: maybe a Facebook you are l during the course of
Speaker 1: the episode that might be obsolete, might be doubly obsolete
Speaker 1: because we have changed our email address again. You can
Speaker 1: now reach us at history Podcasts at i heart radio
Speaker 1: dot com, and we're all over social media at missed
Speaker 1: in History and you can subscribe to our show on
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Speaker 1: History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For
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