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Text: Mi Gente Magazine – Photo: Internet
It was called the Spanish flu, but the 1918 pandemic did not occur in Spain. His starting point was the United States, in Kansas and Texas, according to medical historians. From there, he was transported to Europe by American troops participating in the First World War. It was the most pressing pandemic of the 20th century, which in Chile hit hard on the healthcare system and society.
“For many historians, this event is an important milestone in the historical process of unifying the world through disease and to which our country is a participant,” says the study “Chile between the pandemics: 1918 flu, globalization.” and a new cure, ”researchers Marcelo Lopez and Miriam Beltran of Catholic University.
Before the Spanish flu, there were records and historical experience of influenza in our country. The knowledge gained through work carried out by public health and the historian Pedro Lautaro Ferrer (1869 – 1937), who described it as one of the epidemics that were regularly observed in the country during the colonial period.
One of these phenomena occurred in 1737. It was a flu pandemic that began in Europe and entered America thanks to the governorship of New Spain. In the society of that time, these events “provided fertile ground for healers and sorcerers and a tangible demonstration of the state of social insecurity caused by epidemics,” the study said.
Later, in the 19th century, a flu pandemic wave was unleashed between 1889 and 1890. It was a pandemic that arose in the central region of Asia, at that time in the Russian Empire. It was an event that had a more “modern” connotation due to the way it spread through the media. Everyone was waiting for the progression of the disease. In October 1889, the flu was detected in St. Petersburg, and in January 1890 the first cases were known in Buenos Aires, Cape Town, Tokyo, San Francisco and other cities.
Spanish flu hit
Marcelo Lopez Campiglie, a researcher at the University of Catholics Faculty of Humanities and Medical Research, one of the authors of the study, explains that among pandemics of a destructive nature and with high social impact, such as the one we experience Today, when it comes to coronavirus, waves flu (1890-1892) and cholera (1886-1888) are counted in the 19th century, and Spanish flu (1918-1921), Asian flu (1958) and 1968 flu. ,
By 1900, influenza was a phenomenon recorded at the intercontinental level. And the outbreak of the pandemic in 1918 throughout the world was one of the most relevant in the history of modern medicine: from January 1918 to December 1920, 50 million people died.
Cases of infection and death have been reported on all continents. Such was the uncertainty in the scientific world that this entailed great social changes.
In the case of Chile, 40 111 people died. This has contributed to the modernization of public health in Chile and the introduction of a new model of medicine or preventive medicine in the 1920s.
The way in which pandemics are managed varies depending on the social, political and scientific context. Lopez explains that during the nineteenth century, sanitary cords were available in the case of cholera with isolation, hospitals, infirmaries and surveillance through sanitary inspectors.
Of the total number of deaths recorded between 1918 and 1921, only 2,676 were confirmed by doctors, and the remaining 37,377 were registered as “witnesses” who were practitioners, including government officials associated with hospitals or the Civil Register. Therefore, it is appropriate to estimate with a margin of 40113 deaths.
Resources were not very efficient. The reason, according to the researcher, was poor material conditions, such as houses without drinking water, without insulation for cold and without ventilation, among other things, and the population with serious nutritional problems (physiological suffering).
In addition, the state did not have sufficient institutional and legal instruments until the creation of the Supreme Council of Public Hygiene in 1891, an advisory executive body on hygiene and municipal laboratories. Subsequently, the issuance of the first health code in 1918 helped, which, as Lopez emphasizes, “first created a unique directorate for organizing the country’s health care.”
With the onset of the 20th century, this panorama has changed. Thanks to the modernization of public health from the 1920s and 1930s and the creation of new medical schools (U. de Concepción, U. Católica, U. Austral). But especially with the creation of the National Health Service in 1952. “It was possible to have a territorial organization that would direct the achievements of science to the population, such as, for example, antibiotics, vaccination, x-rays, mother and child nutrition, and“ medical personnel, nursing, social assistance, medical technology, medical specialties, etc. who led the care of the population in critical situations, ”says Lopez.
Uniting Pandemics
Pandemics not only contributed to the development of medicine, but also “united” the world, the researcher explains. And “Covid 19” is the last notable example of this process, which the French historian Emmanuel Le Loy Laduri described as the unification of the world by microbes, “which corresponds to the emergence of an intensive process of contact between Asian societies, Europe, America and Africa began to develop in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, at the dawn of globalization. “
Today, says Lopez, after the process of intensifying the globalization process since the end of the 20th century, thanks to the expansion of hypercapitalism, various migrations, the growth of cities and the growth of air transport, “Covid-19 can be assessed as a biosocial warning of a planetary crisis.”
The coronavirus crisis implies global change, as well as other pandemics. “This forces us to pay attention to our production models, which are invasive for sensitive ecological systems, our food systems, which have spurred a boom in the pig and poultry industry (legal and illegal), and this is the place of outbreaks of zoonosis, which is demonstrated by the current pandemic, as well as intercontinental movements that can turn every person into a potential pandemic agent, ”says Lopez.
The Spanish flu (1918), Asian flu (1958) and the 1968 flu had a strong social impact.
“Today we can assess a certain concern, which is not yet a prelude to panic, and which is natural in these changes in our biosocial order, but which is included in another system of health and medicine, since the pathogen is identified (coronavirus) and it has institutional a structure that has national and world experience in fighting this pandemic, ”warns Lopez.
However, this does not guarantee the absence of episodes that may affect us. This is part of the historical identity of pandemics in order to preserve the shadow of secrecy about their evolution. Lopez warns that this aspect deserves attention, “if we add a restless social and political context similar to the one we have seen in recent months, along with a deep sense of distrust of what constitutes power.”
Studying the globalizing background that the study of diseases has been fundamental to the development of society for centuries, he shows a preliminary study, which emphasizes Lopez, “that our history was intertwined in part due to our connection with health, which as such, it is usually larger connected with culture, politics and society than with science. ”
(Source: Diario La Tercera)
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