H1N1
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For the first time in nearly a century, widespread disease epidemics are once again knocking at the doors of America and Europe, as was evidenced by the 2009 swine flu outbreak.
According to one epidemiologist, influenza is the biggest infectious disease threat in the world at this time.
An August 2009 report for the United States President affirmed the expert’s predictions. According to statistics, just this disease alone could infect 30 to 50 percent of the U.S. population—about 90 to 150 million. Authorities reported the H1N1 strain could also:
- Cause 1.8 million U.S. hospital admissions during an epidemic, with up to 300,000 patients requiring treatment from intensive care units.
- Kill 30,000 to 90,000 in the United States in a typical winter flu season, concentrated among children and young adults.
- “Pose especially high risks for individuals with certain pre-existing conditions, including pregnant women and patients with neurological disorders or respiratory impairment, diabetes, or severe obesity and possibly for certain populations, such as Native Americans.”
Reports from the first wave of the H1N1 pandemic revealed that a number of hospitals were swamped with patients in need of emergency care.
On average, swine flu victims required “12 days of mechanical ventilation and frequent use of rescue therapies such as high-frequency oscillatory ventilation, prone positioning, neuromuscular blockade, and inhaled nitric oxide” (Journal of the American Medical Association).
Think! What would happen if 90,000 Americans required the same treatments—just for this type of influenza—living their last days in hospitals? U.S. hospitals would be unable to keep up with the long lines of patients that would be knocking on their doors.
Cases in Britain doubled to 100,000 in one week in July 2009! The virus has had such a significant impact on the country that within minutes of opening, the National Pandemic Flu service website crashed.
Yet the initial estimated figures failed to come to pass. Due to this, many people have already forgotten about the potential death toll.
Still, H1N1 continued to spread. A map of infected areas shows that cases have stricken almost all corners of the world. So far, the only places where H1N1 has not been confirmed are Greenland, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, and several smaller African nations.
“Dr Alan Hay, director of the London-based World Influenza Centre, said the extensive summer outbreak in Britain had not followed expected patterns and warned the Department of Health needed to be prepared for a more deadly form of the disease” (Guardian).
Public health professor Dr. John Powell added, “There are enormous parallels with 1918 and our current pandemic. They are spreading at a similar rate, but we don’t know if the virus will mutate. If it does, this is when it could become very dangerous” (Daily Mail).
To many, these numbers seem impossible—up to 90,000 Americans dead in under a year? Those below age 50 have never experienced even the possibility of a pandemic so devastating. Typically, about 40,000 die of all forms of the flu in the U.S. for a whole year.
Without firsthand experience of a nationwide disease pandemic, many can only look to history to understand the type of disease prophesied to come upon the world—and especially the modern nations of Israel—in their lifetime.
For perspective, we turn to the worst recorded flu pandemic of all time: the 1918 Spanish flu outbreak. Up to 675,000 in the U.S. were killed—along with between 40 and 100 million worldwide.
What Past Pandemics Reveal
Past pandemics demonstrated an ability to strike quickly—almost literally overnight—overwhelming medical services. Such was the 1918 Spanish Influenza.
This early twentieth-century pandemic started much the same as the one in 2009. Three years before the 1918 virus took its worst toll, it first surfaced in birds, according to the CDC.
From 1915 to 1916, the United States suffered a catastrophic respiratory disease epidemic, which significantly increased the death toll resulting from pneumonia and influenza complications. Although mortality rates decreased by 1917, the populace’s weakened immune systems paved the way for the pandemic’s first wave in March 1918.
The pandemic continued in three stages over a 12-month period: the first wave reached Europe, the U.S. and Asia in late spring and summer; a second—and more deadly—strain appeared approximately six months later, wiping out entire families from September to November 1918; and a third wave struck in the early spring of 1919.
Unlike most viruses, which normally affect the very young, the weak and the elderly, the 1918 influenza targeted healthy adults between the ages of 20 and 40. Victims suffocated as their immune systems broke down, filling their lungs with a reddish liquid, which often bubbled out of them as they died.
In 1918, many churches in America closed, schools also closed, the government banned public meetings, businesses collapsed from lack of customers, state institutions became overrun with orphaned children, and infected postal carriers were unable to deliver mail. Heaps of rancid garbage lined city streets. Decomposing bodies overflowed from morgues and had to be stored in nearby elementary schools. Wherever people ventured, the smell of rotting flesh haunted them.
Imagine this and the following horrific scenarios playing out today—unfolding on the very streets of your hometown. Imagine the disease taking someone close to you—an acquaintance, co-worker, friend or family member.
A letter written by a military doctor on September 29, 1918, described the dreadful conditions at Fort Devens, near Boston: “These men start with what appears to be an attack of la grippe or influenza, and when brought to the hospital they very rapidly develop the most viscous type of pneumonia that has ever been seen. Two hours after admission they have the mahogany spots over the cheek bones, and a few hours later you can begin to see the cyanosis extending from their ears and spreading all over the face, until it is hard to distinguish the coloured men from the white. It is only a matter of a few hours then until death comes, and it is simply a struggle for air until they suffocate.”
Later he wrote, “It takes special trains to carry away the dead. For several days there were no coffins and the bodies piled up something fierce, we used to go down to the morgue...and look at the boys laid out in long rows. It beats any sight they ever had in France after a battle. An extra long barracks has been vacated for the use of the morgue, and it would make any man sit up and take notice to walk down the long lines of dead soldiers all dressed up and laid out in double rows” (PBS).
One pandemic survivor recounted the bodies that stacked up in Vancouver, Canada: “The undertaking parlours couldn’t handle the bodies as people died...they were having to use school auditoriums and places like that to store bodies temporarily” (The Canadian Press).
In the book Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It, Gina Kolata, a reporter for The New York Times, stated that if the Spanish Influenza were to strike the U.S. now, it would have devastating results: “If such a plague came today, killing a similar fraction of the U.S. population, 1.5 million Americans would die, which is more than the number felled in a single year by heart disease, cancers, strokes, chronic pulmonary disease, AIDS, and Alzheimer’s disease combined.”
Most experts put this estimate much higher. Remember, these numbers are specific to a highly stable, First World nation. Imagine the multiple hundreds of millions who could die worldwide.
This pandemic—and the virus that caused it—is just one of many that have left their mark on society. Here is another.
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