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It is possible that until a few months ago you had not heard of the “Spanish flu”, the pandemic that killed millions of people in the early 20th century. And surely with the coronavirus crisis you have already heard it mentioned.
Often listed as “the mother of all pandemics,” the one that would go down in history as the Spanish flu killed 20 to 50 million people around the world, according to estimates by the World Health Organization.
It spread between 1918 and 1920, and scientists believe that it was infected by at least a third of the world’s population at that time, calculated in 1,800 million inhabitants.
It even caused more deaths than World War I, which was ending just as the pandemic broke out.
While the world reacts to covid-19, we propose that you look back to the time of the last great pandemic that put the planet on hold. This is what happened when it was all over.
1921, a different world
Certainly a lot has changed in 100 years.
Medicine and science were much more limited fields to treat the disease, if we compare them with the present time.
Doctors back then knew that a microorganism was responsible for the flu epidemic and that the disease could be transmitted person-to-person, but they thought the cause was bacteria. nor a virus.
Treatments were also limited. The first antibiotic was only discovered until 1928, and the first flu vaccine was only available in the 1940s.
But above all, there were no public health systems. And even in developed countries health was a luxury.
“In industrialized nations, most physicians worked independently or were funded by charities or religious institutions. And many people did not have access to them,” says Laura Spinney, scientific writer and author of the book. “The pale horseman: lto the Spanish flu of 1918 and how the world changed“.
Young and poor
To make matters worse, the 1918 pandemic struck in a way that had not been seen in previous ones, such as the one that occurred between 1889 and 1890, and killed nearly a million people.
Most of the fatalities were people in their 20s and 40s, and men were notoriously more affected than women.
Probably because the pandemic is believed to have started on one of the crowded Western Front battlefields and then dispersed when soldiers returned home from the war.
The disease was also relentless with the poorest countries.
A study from Harvard University, published this year, estimates that about 0.5% of the US population of that time he died due to the epidemic (about 550,000 people).
Instead, India saw 17 million people die in the country due to the disease.
“The victims that produced World War I and the Spanish flu had a disastrous economic impact, “said Catharine Arnold, author of the book” Pandemic 1918 “.
Arnold’s grandparents were among the victims of that pandemic.
“In many countries, there were no young men left to run the family business, run farms, train for professions and trades, marry and raise children to replace those millions who had died,” said Arnold.
“The lack of eligible men led to the so-called ‘spare women’ problem, with millions of women they failed find a suitable match, “he added.
Women at work
Although the epidemic did not cause radical changes in the social structure – not as great as the fall of feudalism by the black plague in the fourteenth century, for example -, it was essential to tip the gender balance in many countries.
Texas A&M University researcher Christine Blackburn said the decline in the US workforce It opened several doors for women.
“The lack of workers caused by the flu and the war gave women access to the labor market“Blackburn explained.
“By 1920, women were 21% of all employees in the country,” she added.
That same year the US Congress ratified the nineteenth amendment to its Constitution, which granted women the right to vote.
In addition, the new female workers benefited from the wage increases that resulted from the labor shortage.
In the United States, for example, government data shows that wages in the manufacturing sector they increased US $ 0,21 time in 1915 at US $ 0,56 in 1920.
Genetic legacy
The scientists found that babies born during the epidemic were more likely to develop conditions such as heart conditions, compared to children born before or after the outbreak.
Analysis done in the UK and Brazil showed that those born between 1918 and 1919 also tended to have fewer options to access higher education or be full-time employees.
Some theories suggest that the stress caused by the pandemic in mothers could have affected the development of the fetus.
Another clue to the genetic impact of the pandemic was found in an analysis of soldier recruitment information for the US Army, who said that young people born in 1919 They had “onemm “maverage height than the rest of his colleagues.
Anti-colonialism and international cooperation
In 1918, India completed more than a century under the colonial rule of the United Kingdom.
In May of that year, the Spanish flu hit the country hard. And she was more violent with the Indians than with British residents.
Statistics show that the mortality rate in the lowest castes reached 61.6 per 1,000 people, Meanwhile intre the EuropeansIt was of less than 9 for every 1.000.
Thus, Indian nationalist sectors fueled the perception that British rulers had not adequately managed the crisis.
In 1919, an edition of Young India, the newspaper published by Mahatma Gandhi, criticized the British authorities quite firmly.
“In no other civilized country could a government have left things as undone as the government in India did during the prevalence of such a terrible and catastrophic epidemic,” the editorial read.
But, at the same time, the pandemic also showed the importance of international cooperation, beyond the geopolitical nightmare it had left behind world war i
In 1923, the League of Nations, the multilateral body that preceded the UN, created the Health Organization.
It was a technical agency that created new international epidemic control systems and was led by professional doctors instead of diplomats, as was the supranational body in charge of health issues until then, the Office International d’Hygiène Publique.
The World Health Organization would only be created in 1948, after the foundation of the UN.
Public health
The damage caused by the pandemic stimulated the advancement of public health, which was promoted as the development of social medicine.
In 1920, Russia was the first country to install a public health network. Other countries followed suit.
“Many countries created or renewed ministries of health in the 1920s,” said Laura Spinney.
“This was a direct result of the pandemic, during which public health leaders had been left out of cabinet meetings entirely or simply had to devote themselves to requesting funds and executive powers from other departments,” he added.
Jennifer Cole, an anthropologist at Royal Holloway University in London, noted that the combination of pandemic and war sowed the seeds of welfare states in many parts of the world.
“The provision of welfare by the ANDthis came out of this context, since it had a large number of widows, orphans and disabled people, “he explains.
“Pandemics seem to shed light on society and societies can emerge from them with a fairer and more equitable model, “said Cole.
Quarantines and social isolation
The history of social isolation at the beginning of the 20th century is a history of two cities: in September 1918, different locations in the United States. They organized parades to promote the war bonds, whose sales would help finance the conflict that was not yet completely over.
Two of these cities took diametrically different measures regarding the parade once the first cases of the disease were known.
While Philadelphia decided to go ahead with the event, St. Louis chose to cancel it.
A month later, more than 10,000 people had died of the flu in the first one. While in San Luis, the number total remained below 700.
The disparity in statistics became a case study that concluded that social distance is an effective strategy to curb epidemics.
An analysis of the interventions that were made in various cities during 1918 showed that those municipalities that had banned mass gatherings and closed theaters, schools, and churches had fewer deaths.
Additionally, a team of US economists It concluded that the cities that took the strictest measures were the ones that later had the fastest economic recovery.
Forgotten pandemic
Despite its lessons, the Spanish flu was in many ways a forgotten pandemic.
It was overshadowed in the public sphere by World War I, in part because some governments censored the media in their countries to prevent them from reporting its effects during the war.
The crisis is also largely absent from history books and popular culture.
“Even in the centennial year of the pandemic (2018) you will not find monuments commemorating the Spanish flu and few cemeteries that highlight the sacrifice of doctors and nurses,” wrote the medical historian. Mark Honigsbaum.
“You also won’t find many novels, songs, or works of art from the period that refer to the 1918 pandemic.”
One of the few exceptions is the “Self-portrait with the Spanish Flu”, by Edward munch, which the Norwegian artist painted while suffering from the disease.
Honigsbaum also noted that the 1924 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica did not even mention the pandemic in its review of the “most hectic years” of the 20th century, and the first history books that referenced the epidemic were published around 1968.
Covid-19 has certainly brought that pandemic back to the memory of many.
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