The influenza pandemic of 1918 essay 1034 words bartleby. The fascinating, true story of the worlds deadliest disease. Pale rider the spanish flu of 1918 and how it changed the. The great influenza the book the great influenza by john barry takes us back to arguably one of the greatest medical disasters in human history, the book focuses on the influenza pandemic which took place in the year 1918. And yet, in our popular conception it exists largely as a footnote to world war i. Although the 1918 flu killed more people worldwide in a year than world war i did in four years, the epidemic has been comparatively forgotten. It was the emergence of a completely novel influenza a virus in asia in 1957 and another in 1968 that confirmed the suspicionharbored since the great spanish pandemic of 1918 that the influenza a. The startling fact is that the combination of sources still exist today. American pandemic the lost worlds of the 1918 influenza epidemic pdf. But this book draws together information from a large number of sources and tells a more comprehensive story.
Late february and early march marks the 100th anniversary of the spanish flu s appearance in the united states. The story of the great influenza pandemic of 1918 and. Human influenza a virus infections for which the pathology is described include h1n1, h2n2, and h3n2, which caused pandemics in 1918, 1957, and 1968, respectively. Even dramatic series like downton abbey mention the event tragically. Each time that a new subtype enters the human population it replaces the previously circulating subtype. With a death toll of between 50 and 100 million people and a global reach, the spanish flu of 19181920 was the greatest human disaster, not only of the twentieth century, but possibly in all of recorded history. In the dying months of world war i, spanish flu suddenly overwhelmed the world, killing between 50 and 100 million people. The second wave, brief in duration, was the most deadly, accounting for millions of deaths, most in october and november of 1918. Between the years 1918 and1920, influenza raged around the globe in the worst pandemic in recorded history, killing at least fifty million people, more than half a million of them americans. There are a lot of tidbits about the influenza pandemic of 1918. American pandemic the lost worlds of the 1918 influenza. In 1918 the great flu epidemic killed an estimated 40 million people virtually overnight. If such a plague returned today, taking a comparable percentage of the u.
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