Best Selling Historian John Barry Lectures on the Flu Pandemic of 1918 and Its Relevance to Public Health Today

NEW YORK CITY, November 18 ??? An audience of over 40 people gathered at the Academy last night to hear a lecture on the pandemic flu by John M. Barry, historian and best-selling author of The Great Influenza (Viking 2004). He began by describing the flu of 1918, known as the ???Spanish flu,??? as the most violent pandemic the world has ever seen. Although the first wave of influenza was mild, appearing in Kansas in the spring of 1918, World War I brought back a second wave in a lethal form, which rapidly spread among the troops and killed almost 200,000 in October of 1918 alone. The strain was so virulent, Barry explained, that it killed at least 40 million people, ???certainly killing more people in 24 weeks, than AIDS has killed in 24 years.???

Often misdiagnosed by doctors as cholera, typhoid fever or dengue fever, the symptoms of the 1918 flu were far more devastating than those of today???s flu, which is mostly marked by fever or muscle pain. Reading a letter written by a doctor to a colleague regarding one of the first army camps hit by the pandemic, Barry portrayed a virus so toxic that it resembled a plague more than a flu: ???These men start with what appears to be an ordinary attack of la grippe of influenza,??? the letter said. ???When brought to the hospital they very rapidly develop the most vicious type of pneumonia that has ever been seen. A few hours later you began to see the cyanosis (turning blue from lack of oxygen) extending from their ears and spreading all over the face until it is hard to distinguish the colored men from the whites.??? Other agonizing symptoms flu victims experienced were bleeding from the skin, eyes and ears, intestinal hemorrhaging, paralysis of the spine and hysteria.

Historian John M. Barry addressing an audience on the deadly flu pandemic of 1918.

One of the most startling facts regarding the Spanish flu, Barry explained, was that it was the most deadly for people between the ages of 20 and 40, killing them within days or even hours of contracting the virus. Although flu deaths are normally caused by the presence of bacterial pneumonia, this flu triggered the onset of acute respiratory distress syndrome in which the lungs fill up with fluid and cannot provide oxygen to the rest of the body. This leaves anyone, including the young and healthy, a vulnerable target.

Although a high percentage of the general public obtains the yearly flu vaccine offered by employers or other public sources, the flu is still dismissed by many as hazardous only to the elderly and children, and people with weakened immune systems. Today, the current U.S. flu vaccine shortage deems the remaining ???healthy??? population ineligible for flu shots, because they do not fall into a high risk category, thus potentially placing them in the most danger if a virulent flu strain were to hit.

It is difficult to imagine that the public???s response to this deadly virus back in 1918 could have been any more chaotic. As President Wilson led a campaign to boost morale for the war and patriotism, authorities downplayed the flu crisis (stating that ???fear was actually worse than the flu itself???) while people saw the bodies piling up. Authorities had no intention of shifting the focus from the war to the flu epidemic, which was forcing people to use steam shovels to dig mass graves. Terror spread throughout the nation and children starved, because there was no one to feed them or to volunteer help. Barry depicted the decline of the American population???s trust in the government, in their fellow neighbors and in society as a whole. Americans should have had the opportunity to rejoice for the end of a long, hard war and the prospect of safety and freedom, but instead, the Spanish flu was taking the lives of loved ones that the war had spared.

Toward the lecture???s close, Barry fervently expressed that the single most significant message this pandemic should teach us is the need to take influenza and public health issues far more seriously. An estimated 36,000 people die a year internationally from the flu, including 2,000 in New York alone. The government devotes less funding to the flu than West Nile Virus, which is a serious and deadly virus but has only caused approximately 650 deaths in the United States over a span of six years. Barry argued that the government needs to take dramatic action in building an infrastructure for creating vaccines for deadly, fast-moving viruses. The rapid spread of AIDS, SARS and certainly the flu of 1918 have clearly illustrated that a delayed response in a time of crisis results in many unnecessary deaths.

John M. Barry is Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Center for Bioenvironmental Research of Tulane University. He is also the author of five books, including Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America, which won several prizes, including the Francis Parkman Prize of the Society of American Historians for outstanding book of American history. He has been a consultant for PBS documentaries and museums, and appears frequently on NPR, CNN, PBS and other broadcast media. He has also written for such national publications as Sports Illustrated, Newsweek, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, The Washington Post, Esquire and others. The Great Influenza was on the New York Times Best Seller List.

The New York Academy of Medicine, one of the country???s premier urban health policy and intervention centers, focuses on enhancing the health of people living in cities through research, education, advocacy, and prevention.

-by Christine Visich

Posted on December 3, 2004

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