Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Spanish flu killed 100 million.. and we’re not doing enough to prevent another outbreak
. It is only a few hours then until th comes and it is simply a struggle air until they suffocate. It is horrible.” ame and fortune offered no tection. American silent film icon old Lockwood was killed by the ase in New York in October 1918. iplomat and Tory MP Colonel Mark es died in his hotel room in Paris r falling ill while helping egotiate peace treain February 1919. is descendants wed scientists to n his coffin in 2007 to ck if any flu particles survived for study. rime Minister David yd George vived Spanish as did US Presit Woodrow son, Kaiser helm II of Germany, and a young Walt Disney. But London hospitals, already struggling with war casualties, were overwhelmed.
Medical schools stopped their classes and sent students to help on the wards.
Theatres, dance halls and churches across the country were shut for months to stop the flu spreading. Streets were sprayed with chemicals. Some factories even relaxed no-smoking rules, believing cigarettes would ward off the virus. People were advised to: “Wash inside the nose with soap and water each night and morning; force yourself to sneeze night and morning, then breathe deeply. “Walk home from work and eat plenty of porridge.” Living under constant threat from the disease, children even composed a new nursery rhyme to sing as they jumped over the skipping rope.
It went: “I had a little bird, it’s name was Enza. “I opened the window and in-flu-enza.” In America, morgues quickly filled up and towns struggled to find places to store bodies. The only way to avoid the virus was to sever all contact with the outside world. Australia introduced strict quarantine controls and one village in Alaska took even more extreme measures.
Pathologist Johan Hultin, who spent years studying Spanish flu, said: “The elders stationed armed guards at the village perimeter with orders to shoot anyone who tried to enter. The village survived unscathed.”
But not even a remote location was a guarantee of safety. By the time the pandemic ran its course in 1919 the tiny Pacific island of Western Samoa had lost one fifth of its population.
The virus spanned the globe, but it became known as Spanish flu because the neutral country’s newspapers devoted pages of coverage, especially after Spanish king Alfonso XIII was struck down by the disease.
British, French, German and US newspapers avoided reporting on it for fear of undermining wartime morale. Experts believe conditions are now ripe for a new pandemic just as deadly.
There has been a rise in the proportion of diseases that cross over from animals – 75% of new infections during the past decade have come from animals and these mutated conditions are harder to contain and treat.
The growth of international travel also means a new virus could spread far more rapidly around the globe.
And while modern medicine has progressed with vaccinations and ventilators to keep patients alive as they struggle to breathe, hospitals could not treat patients fast enough if the virus infected as many people as Spanish flu.
Dr Gregory Poland, an expert in viruses at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, said another global flu crisis was “100%” certain. He added: “We will have another pandemic. What’s unpredictable is the severity of it.”