[lit-ideas] Re: flu vaccine/WW1
- From: David Ritchie <ritchierd@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 11:15:18 -0700
on 10/28/04 10:54 AM, Harold Hungerford at hh@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
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.
>
I was going to make the point that the first wave of the 1918 epidemic was
mild and that the second wave, with a catastrophic death rate, only appeared
in August, so there was not much time to affect troops in trenches before
the armistice in early November. But by October some twenty percent of the
U.S. army was ill. Through the end of September, 24,000 U.S. soldiers died
of the 'flu' (what percentage of these were still in the U.S. is not noted)
and there were 34,000 battle deaths.
Here's a stunning number from Roy Porter, "The Greatest Benefit to Mankind;
A Medical History of Humanity." One quarter of the population of Samoa died
in the 1918 epidemic.
I have been looking to confirm the worldwide number and found that I no
longer own a history of that epidemic. Sigerist, once the locus classicus
on many such matters, but now outdated, put the number at ten million.
David Ritchie
Portland, Oregon
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