[lit-ideas] Re: flu vaccine/WW1

  • From: Harold Hungerford <hh@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 10:54:54 -0700

I was going by the tables in:

<http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/FWWdeaths.htm>

But I looked at the wrong total. Keegan's 8.4 million figure almost 
matches what the Spartacus page gives. The point remains that even with 
the error (sorry!) corrected, the flu deaths far outnumber the wartime 
deaths (though they evidently do not include civilian deaths caused by 
military action). And of course given the conditions of trench warfare 
it's extremely likely that many military deaths were caused by flu.

Harold Hungerford

On Oct 28, 2004, at 10:17 AM, David Ritchie wrote:

> on 10/27/04 11:46 AM, Harold Hungerford at hh@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
>
>> The 1918 flu epidemic killed 675,000 Americans and at least 21 million
>> others worldwide. Estimates go up to 50 million.
>>
>> In the First World War, a bit over 5 million soldiers died on both
>> sides, of whom 126,000 were Americans.
>>
> Without calling into question your point, may I note that your war 
> deaths
> figure seems a little low.  Here's John Keegan on the subject:
>
> "To the million dead of the British Empire and the 1,700,000 French 
> dead, we
> must add 1,500,000 soldiers of the Habsburg Empire who did not return, 
> two
> million Germans, 460,000 Italians, 1,700,000 Russians and many 
> hundreds of
> thousands of turks; their numbers were never counted."
>
> I make that 8.4 million, not counting Turks, Armenians, Americans 
> and...
>
> Two other things to bear in mind: the number of post war 
> casualties--people
> in wheelchairs who died of urinary tract infections, for example--is 
> not
> recorded, but the statistics on death within age cohorts are startling.
> Among men born between 1892 and 1895--those who were between 19 and 22 
> when
> the war broke out--between 35 and 37 percent (depending on country) 
> were
> killed.
>
> I am relying on John Keegan, "The First World War," p. 423.
>
> David Ritchie
> Portland, Oregon
>
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