The Spanish Influenza Pandemic of 1918

EARLY in September 1918, the United States was invaded by a scourge of highly infectious and fatal disease, which spread with rapidity throughout the country. It was pandemic in its nature, and partook of many of the characteristics of influenza, grip and pneumonia. No one seemed to know much about the disease or its treatment, and medical science and public health agencies were alike unprepared to cope with it. About all that could be done at the start was to adopt and attempt to enforce drastic regulations to minimize contagion; but even in view of these regulations, and when the plague had burst forth in all its widespread malignity, the country at large seemed slow to awaken to the enormity of the peril which it faced. It certainly was a disconcerting fact that, at the very time when vast numbers of the people in widely-distributed localities had organized themselves, through the Red Cross and other well-known and efficient mediums, to fight disease and prevent suffering and death, we should be smitten with a visitation which caused more casualties and deaths among the peaceful citizens in the homeland than the deadly missiles and poisonous gases of the enemy effected among the American Expeditionary Forces overseas in the great World War. From September 9 to November 9, according to reports received by the Federal Census Bureau from forty-six large cities in the United States having a combined population of 23,000,000 souls, there was a total of 82,306 deaths attributed to the scourge. In a similar period-of-time, in the same communities, the normal number of deaths dues to influenza and pneumonia would have been about 4,000. In the latter part of September 85,000-cases in Massachusetts alone were reported; and by the first week in October the disease was prevalent in nearly all sections of the United States-twenty-three States, from Massachusetts in the East to California in the West, and from Florida in the South-east to Washington in the North-west, were experiencing the mysterious malady. More than 14,000 cases in the military camps of the country were reported to the office of the Surgeon General of the Army within one period of twenty-four hours. Up to January 4, 1919, according to the Census Bureau, the mortality due to the fatal disease was 115,258 in forty-six cities of the United States containing one-fifth of the population of the country; while, according to statistics submitted to the Actuarial Society of America in July, 1919, 450,000 deaths occurred in the United States in the Autumn and early Winter of 1918 due to this pandemic disease, which wrought its greatest havoc among infants and persons in adult working life. The mortality of males was greater than that of females, while the highest mortality caused by the disease affected persons of the wage-earning class, especially those situated in the lowest economic range. The origin or source of the disease was unknown. Some experts looked upon it as simply a variety of a well-known disease prevalent, with occasional outbreaks of violence, for hundreds of years. Others attempted to identify it with a form of pneumonic plague that has raged in parts of China for a number of year's past, China and its neighboring lands in Asia forming a vast storehouse of infection from which great epidemics have swept in waves across and around the globe.