The 1918 pandemic swept nearly every continent and infected almost half the world's population before it ended the following year, leaving 20 million to 50 million people dead. In Washington and around the country, many stores and schools were shuttered. Houses were placed under quarantine. Many people wore face masks and friends avoided each other. Frantic physicians prescribed everything they could think of, from blood-letting to vaccines for other diseases to the new German drug aspirin. Some treatments killed the patients, some eased symptoms. None cured or prevented the disease.( Robert Siegel. (2004)) In January 1918, the first reported cases showed up on an Army base in Kansas, apparently brought in by infected recruits from Haskell County, Kansas. The virus almost certainly started in birds and mutated to infect humans, eventually passing easily from person to person. Massive troop movements at the end of the war swiftly carried the virulent disease around the world. The 1918 flu pandemic killed 20 million to 50 million people in 1918-1919. About half the world's 1.8 billion people were infected. About one-fourth of the United States' 104 million residents were infected; 675,000 died. The 1918 strain mutated so that people could infect each other.( Robert Siegel. (2004)) Symptoms Both types have produced normal flu symptoms of fever, nausea, cough, sore throat, aches and diarrhea. Many patients develop severe pneumonia. Dark spots appear on cheeks and patients turn blue, suffocating from a lack of oxygen as lungs fill with a frothy, bloody mucus. Both have resulted in a high death rate.( Robert Siegel. (2004))
The 1918 virus appeared as a natural outbreak, and we need to understand why it behaved the way it did if we're ever going to prevent something like that from happening again..............
