Influenza of the 68s, the pandemic that killed a million people but went almost unnoticed in the press – Coronavirus

A respiratory virus that appeared in China crosses borders, turns into a pandemic, and kills a million people in a year and a half. Coronavirus 2020? No, the Hong Kong flu of the late 1960s, reports AFP.

The first pandemic in the contemporary era, this epidemic of influenza A (H3N2), detected in mid-68 in the enclave of Hong Kong, killed 50,000 people in the United States and 31,000 in France.

“People came with stretchers, in a catastrophic state. They died of pulmonary hemorrhage, with bruises, gray lips. They were all ages, 20, 30, 40 and more,” recalled Dr. Pierre Dellamonica in 2005 in Libération. .

The dead were huddled in “hospital back rooms and morgues” at the height of the epidemic in France in December 1969, said health historian Patrice Bourdelais.

There are no headlines on the covers from that time, no government action and not even a medical alert.

At the height of the epidemic in France on December 18, newspapers reported an epidemic of “stationary” flu (Le Figaro) or “apparently returning” (Le Monde).

How do you explain that attitude? At that time, the medical community, leaders, the press, and the general population had almost blind faith in progress and the new weapons, vaccines, and antibiotics that worked miracles, annihilating, for example, the scourge of tuberculosis, Patrice Bourdelais explains.

Furthermore, the sensitivity to death was not what it is today: “The 31,000 influenza victims in Hong Kong did not create a scandal, they went unnoticed for several decades,” says the historian. It took 2003 and Studies carried out by the epidemiologist Antoine Flahault to analyze the victims of this epidemic in France.

Anthropocene disease

It was the era of “Trente glorieuses”, the three decades associated with the post-World War II economic boom. “In this multidimensional curve of progress,” an accident like the deadly flu was not as intolerable as it is today.

International tensions, with the war in Vietnam or the humanitarian crisis in Biafra in Africa, relativized the problems of a bloodier epidemic than others.

It was exactly the opposite of the present: the Covid-19 epidemic alienated any other subject and caused immense paralysis.

Perhaps health has become the main individual concern, and we are unconsciously convinced that today’s societies have all the weapons to combat epidemics, says Bourdelais.

For geographer Michel Lussault, the overwhelming significance of the Covid-19 pandemic simply reflects the “magnitude of the globalization crisis” with its extreme international mobility for markets, people and information.

Infectious physician Philippe Sansonetti illustrates the international spread of coronavirus in the northern hemisphere with a map of international flights from China to Europe and North America: the spread of the virus perfectly matches the density of air connections.

“These emerging infectious diseases are Anthropocene diseases (the era in which the incidence of human activity on Earth becomes predominant), exclusively related to human control of the planet,” he explains.

The Covid-19 pandemic tells a story in three episodes: a “jump between species” with the passage of the bat coronavirus to a human, followed by an “overflow”, with a human infection from other people, and finally “the third stage ” which is the “explosion” of infection on a global scale, through intercontinental means of transport, he points out.

Between 1968 and 1969, it took several months for the influenza A (H3N2) virus to reach the United States and Europe from Asia. This time, a few weeks was enough.