Scarlet Fever Pandemic 1918

The discovery of Penicillin in 1928 and its release as an antibiotic in 1945 put an end to deaths by Scarlet Fever, other infectious diseases and open wound infections.

World War I claimed an estimated 16 million lives. The influenza epidemic that swept the world in 1918 killed an estimated 50 million people. It has been cited as the most devastating epidemic in recorded world history. One-fifth of the world’s population and one-quarter of the United States were attacked by this deadly virus. Within months, it had killed more people than any other illness known to man.

In civilian life, natural selection favors a mild strain. Those who got very ill stayed home, and the mildly ill individuals continued with their lives, preferentially spreading the mild strain. In the trenches of war in 1918, natural selection was reversed. Soldiers with a mild strain stayed where they were, while the severely ill were sent on crowded trains to crowded field hospitals, spreading the deadlier virus. The second wave of this plague began and a stronger version of the flu quickly spread around the world again.

Of the U.S. soldiers who died in Europe during World War I, half of them fell to the influenza virus and not to the enemy.

In order to maintain morale during World War I, wartime censors minimized the early reports of illness and mortality in Germany, Britain, France and the United States, but newspapers were free to report the epidemic’s effects in neutral Spain, where eight million people died, thus helping to give the pandemic the nickname Spanish Flu.

The disease killed in every corner of the globe. In the U.S., approximately 28 percent of the population suffered and 675,000 people died out of a total population of 105 million. The numbers were approximations because, in 1918, the Public Health Service didn’t recognize influenza as a reportable disease.

http://www.healthycellsmagazine.com/articles/the-1918-flu-pandemic

Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader