Extra Credits
Published on 14 Jul 2018The flu arrived in France. It found a pleasant home in the crowded wartime trenches, much to the dismay of the Allies who tried to keep the flu a secret. When it made its way to Madrid, not subject to wartime censorship, it picked up the nickname “Spanish flu.”
July 15, 2018
1918 Flu Pandemic – Trench Fever – Extra History – #2
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July 9, 2018
1918 Flu Pandemic – Emergence – Extra History – #1
Extra Credits
Published on 7 Jul 2018Between 3 and 6 percent of the world’s population died in 18 months when the flu first tried to take over the world. In today’s episode we explore the flu outbreak’s origins from military camps across the United States and Canada.
The flu was the first modern plague — turning our interconnected world against us by spreading through shipping lanes, rail lines and the arteries of industrialized war. Yet it was also the first pandemic of the scientific age, where doctors could to some extent understand what was happening and stand against the infection, though they lacked the tools to stop it. Also, say hello to the voice of “professor” Matt!
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April 20, 2018
Disease, War and The Lost Generation I Between 2 Wars I 1918 Part 2 of 2
TimeGhost
Published on 19 Apr 2018As World War One ends the dying takes on new proportions when the Spanish Flu ravages the world. A whole generation of young people that should be starting their adult life is instead decimated at a devastating rate. The suffering at the end of 1918 will have consequences that last until this day.
Join us on https://timeghost.tv
or on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistoryHosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Spartacus Olsson and Indy Neidell
Directed by: Spartacus Olsson
Produced by: Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus OlssonA TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH
Additional information from TimeGhost:
In the new episode of Between 2 Wars we look at death and suffering in 1918 from another source than the World War: the Spanish Flu and its effects on the young adults of the time. This is the first, but not the last episode in the Between 2 Wars series that focuses on non-military and non-geopolitical events.
To understand these decades we will look occasionally at fashion, technology, design, arts, culture and civil life in general. After all the 1920s and the 1930s is very much the time period when the world became modern in the true sense of the word.
Much of what we still consider contemporary (both things and thoughts) was created in the 20s and 30s. Already the next episode will also focus on civil life as we look at the birth of civil aviation and the radio. After that we dive right back into war with the Russian Civil War!
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May 12, 2013
Influenza: the trade-off between virulence and contagion
Matt Ridley explains why the breathless claims that this or that flu outbreak could rival the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-19 should not be taken too seriously:
Here we go again. A new bird-flu virus in China, the H7N9 strain, is spreading alarm. It has infected about 130 people and killed more than 30. Every time this happens, some journalists compete to foment fear, ably assisted by cautious but worried scientists, and then tell the world to keep calm. We need a new way to talk about the risk of a flu pandemic, because the overwhelming probability is that this virus will kill people, yes, but not in vast numbers.
In recent years flu has always proved vastly less perilous than feared. In 1976 more people may have died from bad reactions to swine-flu vaccine than from swine flu. Since 2005, H5N1 bird flu has killed 374 people, not the two million to 7.4 million deemed possible by the World Health Organization. In 2009, H1N1 Mexican swine flu proved to be a normal flu episode despite apocalyptic forecasts.
No doubt some readers will remind me that, in the story of the boy who cried “Wolf!”, there eventually was a wolf. And that in 1918 maybe 50 million people died of influenza world-wide. So we should always worry a bit. But perhaps it’s not just luck that has made every flu pandemic since then mild; it may be evolutionary logic.
Of course, just about every story about influenza you’ll encounter goes the Chicken Little route:
There’s no mystery as to why we talk up the risk every time: All the incentives point that way. Who among the headline-seeking journalists, reader-seeking editors, fund-seeking scientists, contract-seeking vaccine makers or rear-end-covering politicians has even a modest incentive to say: “It may not be as bad as all that”?
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January 7, 2011
How not to handle public health issues like influenza
I was astonished to hear a radio reporter yesterday admit that much of the reason for the drop in people getting flu shots is the massively overblown oh-my-god-we’re-all-going-to-die media panic last year over Swine flu H1N1. In case you somehow managed to miss out on it last year, every news broadcast seemed to feature yet another doctor or public health official telling us that we faced a worldwide pandemic of H1N1 which was the invincible, all-conquering Überflu to top all plagues we’d ever faced before. Death tolls in the millions were confidently predicted. Every individual who died seemed to be mentioned personally . . . because there were so relatively few compared to those poor folks who died of “ordinary” seasonal flu.
Lorne Gunter gives a bit of credit where it’s due:
Give Allison McGeer credit for being frank about what’s behind this winter’s flu outbreak in Ontario: unnecessary panic over last year’s swine flu “pandemic.” Dr. McGeer, head of infection control at Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital, says flu cases are way up this season because vaccinations are way down; and vaccinations are way down, likely, because too much was made of the swine flu by media and officialdom last winter.
It is a medical case of the doctors who cried wolf, in other words.
[. . .]
There is a fine line between erring on the side of caution and crying wolf. And last year, the UN’s World Health Organization (WHO) blew through that barrier with abandon.
Just as it had on SARS and bird flu and the Ebola virus, the WHO overreacted to swine flu, issuing cautions that were out of all proportion to the risk the disease posed to the public. (Remember in 2003 when the WHO recommended people from around the world stay away from Toronto because the city was host to a few hundred SARS infections?)
But unlike those earlier panics, the WHO pulled out every stop on swine flu. It was as if the UN agency had been surprised that its earlier scares had failed to grow into full-blown pandemics; and so they figured that, finally, swine flu was due to become a worldwide infection requiring a dramatic response from international health officials.
As I wrote last year in May, when even the most panic-stricken media outlets were no longer playing the JuggernautOfDoom theme:
This would have been a good opportunity for de-escalating the panic mongering (and perhaps even attempting to rein-in the media, who were equally to blame for the tone of the information getting to the public). They chose, instead, to actively hide the fact that H1N1 cases were running below the level of ordinary seasonal flu cases (total H1N1 deaths: approximately 18,000 — typical annual death toll from seasonal flu: 250,000-500,000).
The biggest problem isn’t that they over-reacted this time, it’s that it has reduced their credibility the next time they start issuing health warnings. And that’s a bad thing. Unless they pull the same stunt next time, too. In which case, we may start hearing talk about setting up competing organizations to do the job the current entities appear to have given up on.
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May 26, 2010
The pandemic juggernaut of doom . . . that failed to materialize
Lorne Gunter has a good wrap-up of the bone-headed approach of public health officals in Canada to the Swine H1N1 flu “pandemic”:
Good on ordinary Torontonians. Despite all the H1N1/swine flu hype this past winter, just 28.2% of that city’s residents bothered to get vaccinated against the “pandemic;” that’s less than the 35% who usually get shots each year against the seasonal flu.
Even Toronto health care workers couldn’t be stampeded into getting the shots. Only 60% of them bothered.
[. . .]
Even from the start, the World Health Organization and other experts where told this strain of flu was weak and easily defeated. Infection rates never came remotely close to forecasts and death tolls were thankfully much, much lower than for typical seasonal infections.
The trouble, I think, was that so many public health officials have predicted so many pandemics for so long — SARS, bird flu, swine flu — that they simply got caught up in their own warnings and projections. They wouldn’t listen to contrary evidence.
The relevant public health authorities would have served the public interest (and their own credibility for the future) if they’d been much more forthcoming as the early stages of the pandemic showed H1N1 not to be the second coming of the Black Death. Instead, they doubled-down and raised the propaganda bar even higher.
October 27, 2009: Given that regular seasonal flu causes thousands of deaths annually, you’d think it would be good statistical discipline to count the cases of H1N1 separately, both the gauge the severity of the disease and to chart the effectiveness of the vaccination program. Lumping seasonal flu and “flu-like symptoms” together with H1N1 seems a big step backward from normal public health practice.
This would have been a good opportunity for de-escalating the panic mongering (and perhaps even attempting to rein-in the media, who were equally to blame for the tone of the information getting to the public). They chose, instead, to actively hide the fact that H1N1 cases were running below the level of ordinary seasonal flu cases (total H1N1 deaths: approximately 18,000 — typical annual death toll from seasonal flu: 250,000-500,000).
The biggest problem isn’t that they over-reacted this time, it’s that it has reduced their credibility the next time they start issuing health warnings. And that’s a bad thing. Unless they pull the same stunt next time, too. In which case, we may start hearing talk about setting up competing organizations to do the job the current entities appear to have given up on.
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April 15, 2010
“Wolf! Wolf! Wolf! Oh, never mind . . .”
Marni Soupcoff points out that the World Health Organization should have been far more forthcoming after their intial “the sky is falling” announcements caused panic last year over H1N1:
Admit your mistakes before others exaggerate them. That’s the oft-quoted wry advice of writer and retired surgeon Dr. Andrew V. Mason. Perhaps the World Health Organization (WHO) was trying to follow it this week by convening a three-day meeting of outside experts to review the organization’s handling of the recent swine flu outbreak. The problem is, despite claiming to want to know what went wrong as much as what went right, the WHO seems unwilling to even entertain the possibility that it created a counterproductive panic by labelling H1N1 a pandemic of the highest order (“level 6”).
Swine flu, as you’ve probably realized by now, has turned out to be a mild, not particularly deadly virus — it’s certainly far less deadly than the regular seasonal flu that most of us consider a mundane part of everyday life. If one were feeling charitable toward the WHO, one could point out that it didn’t know back in the spring of last year — when it shouted “level 6!” from the rooftops — that H1N1 would prove to be such a relatively innocuous bug. But it’s precisely because it didn’t know that the WHO should have been more cautious with its labelling. You don’t shout “fire” in a crowded theatre just because it smells like the popcorn might be a little on the burnt side. It’s not worth the chaos and alarm you might cause. (Or in this case, the run on vaccines and the resorting to quacks and sketchy “home” remedies.)
Between the unrestrained use of the term “pandemic” and the noted ability of the mass media to hype real and imagined risks, it’s almost surprising we didn’t have doomsday-style cults spring up over H1N1.
