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Revisiting the 1957 and 1968 influenza pandemics
British navy sailors in bed because of influenza in a warehouse near Ipswich, UK, which was transformed into an infirmary for 850 sailors, Sept 19, 1957 Bridgeman Images However, perhaps the crucial factor was the way that Victorian epidemiology and the science of vital statistics made the pandemic form of influenza “visible” to physicians in the UK who had long been sceptical of influenza, then viewed by some as a suspect Italian term for the common cold. A typist in Manchester, UK, during the 1957 influenza pandemic Daily Herald Archive/SSPL/Getty Images To persuade doctors of their error, and convince them that influenza ought to be taken as seriously as cholera and other notifiable diseases, Farr tabulated excess respiratory deaths and made them a regular feature of the annual mortality tables. Another crucial factor was the media: thanks to the expansion of telegraphic communications and the growth of mass market newspapers in the late Victorian period, it now became possible to telegraph news of the spreading infection ahead of its arrival, hence The Lancet's claim in 1890 that “dread” of the Russian influenza had been “started by telegraph”. Some critics of the UK Government's response to COVID-19 have levelled similar charges at today's tabloid press and at disease modellers whose initial forecast that, in the absence of suppressive measures, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 could result in the deaths of 500 000 people in the UK has been widely credited with persuading the UK Government to reverse course and institute a strict lockdown.
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The pandemic century : one hundred years of panic, hysteria and hubris
Ever since the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic, scientists have dreamed of preventing catastrophic outbreaks of infectious disease. Yet, despite a century of medical progress, viral and bacterial disasters continue to take us by surprise, inciting panic and dominating news cycles. From pneumonic plague in LA and `parrot fever' in Argentina to the more recent AIDS, SARS and Ebola epidemics, the last 100 years have been marked by a succession of unanticipated outbreaks and scares. Like man-eating sharks, predatory pathogens are always present in nature, waiting to strike; when one is seemingly vanquished, others appear in its place. The Pandemic Century exposes the limits of science against nature, and how these crises are shaped by humans as much as microbes.
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Taking pandemic sequelae seriously: from the Russian influenza to COVID-19 long-haulers
The result was that by the middle 1890s Russian influenza was being blamed in England for everything from the suicide rate to the general sense of malaise that marked the fin de siècle, and the image of a nation of convalescents, too debilitated to work or return to daily routines, and plagued with mysterious and erratic symptoms and chronic illnesses, had become central to the period's medical and cultural iconography. Some 10 months into the pandemic sparked by the emergence of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, COVID-19 is revealing itself to be similarly protean, comprehensive, and persistent, and a new category of patients is emerging, colloquially known as COVID-19 “long-haulers”. [...]as mitigation strategies have provided some respite for critical care physicians ahead of a resurgence in infections, it appears that COVID-19 is a disease with a bewildering array of complications. [...]the designation of mild disease in some patients risks conflating self-resolving illnesses of short duration with persistent and, according to some long-hauler accounts, emotionally and psychologically debilitating morbid responses. Furthermore, in the late Victorian period ideas of infectious disease causation were in a state of flux and laboratory medicine had yet to supplant older environmental and epidemiological understandings of disease and the close observation of patients' symptoms, particularly in the UK where physicians and medical researchers were suspicious of the “new” German bacteriological methods.
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10 What can we learn from the nervous sequelae of past pandemics?
Dr Mark Honigsbaum, medical historian and senior lecturer, City University of London. A regular contributor to The Observer & The Lancet, the author of five books including The Pandemic Century: One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria, and Hubris (New York and London: Norton; Hurst, 2019), The Fever Trail: In Search of the Cure for Malaria (Farrar Straus Giroux, 2002), and Living With Enza: The Forgotten Story of Britain and the Great Flu Pandemic of 1918 (Macmillan, 2009), which was longlisted for the Royal Society science book of the year in 2009. A specialist in the history of pandemics and infectious disease, his academic work combines insights from the medical and environmental humanities and the philosophy and sociology of science. His current research focuses on the phenomenon of ‘vaccine hesitancy’. Through case studies of recent vaccine controversies he seeks to understand the role that the media and partial or incomplete scientific knowledge of vaccines plays in suspicion of this valuable medical technology. He is also developing a project interrogating the phenomenon of pandemic remembrance and the tension between narrative framings of Covid-19 as a ‘crisis’ and collective experiences of grief and loss enabled by connective digital technologies.AbstractPandemics of respiratory disease have long been associated with peculiar fatigue states and an array of neurological conditions. However, in the absence of compelling biological evidence, in practice it has proved difficult to differentiate these post-viral syndromes from wider epidemiological signals and medical syndromes.Focussing on the ‘Russian influenza’ pandemic of the 1890s, this talk examines the way in which Victorian nerve doctors sought to make sense of the peculiar nervous sequelae that trailed the pandemic. These sequels included nerve exhaustion, psychosis, insomnia and fatigue and, as with Long Covid, provoked disquisitions and disputes in The Lancet and other medical journals.Unlike Long Covid, however, men were more likely to fall prey to these syndromes than women. The result was that rather than stigmatizing male sufferers as malingerers, Victorian neurologists provided a functional diagnosis, the ‘psychoses of influenza’. Drawing on notions of ‘overwork’ and ‘overworry’ and theories of entropy, the psychoses closely resembled neurasthenia and, I argue, provided a similarly acceptable label for a spectrum of somatic and psychosomatic disorders.
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The pandemic century : a history of global contagion from the Spanish flu to Covid-19
\"The most timely and informative history book you will read this year, tracing a century of pandemics, with a new chapter on COVID-19. Ever since the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic, scientists have dreamed of preventing catastrophic outbreaks of infectious disease. Yet, despite a century of medical progress, viral and bacterial disasters continue to take us by surprise, inciting panic and dominating news cycles. From the Spanish flu and the 1924 outbreak of pneumonic plague in Los Angeles, to the 1930 'parrot fever' pandemic and the more recent SARS, Ebola, Zika and - now - COVID-19 epidemics, the last 100 years have been marked by a succession of unanticipated pandemic alarms. In The Pandemic Century, Mark Honigsbaum chronicles 100 years of history in 10 outbreaks. Bringing us right up-to-date with a new chapter on COVID-19, this fast-paced, critically-acclaimed book combines science history, medical sociology and thrilling front-line reportage to deliver the story of our times. As we meet dedicated disease detectives, obstructive public health officials, and gifted scientists often blinded by their own expertise, we come face-to-face with the brilliance and medical hubris shaping both the frontier of science-and the future of humanity's survival.\"--Publisher's description.
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Disease X and other unknowns
[...]the culprit was a tiny bacterium, Legionella pneumophila, that thrives in aquatic environments, including the cooling towers of hotels. From the 1918 “Spanish” influenza pandemic—initially blamed on a bacterium rather than a virus—to the 1930 “parrot fever” pandemic, which was initially thought to be typhoid until it was discovered that parrots and parakeets harboured a tiny bacterium, Chlamydia psittaci, which when inhaled could cause a deadly pneumonia, to the epidemics of Ebola virus disease and Zika virus infection in the 21st century, medical confidence has been repeatedly rocked by unexpected outbreaks of infectious disease. [...]in the case of SARS, scientists' delay in realising they were dealing with a new respiratory pathogen was due in no small part to their conviction that the world was on the brink of an epidemic of H5N1 avian influenza—a view that seemed to be confirmed when ducks, geese, and swans suddenly began dying in two Hong Kong parks. Another lesson of these recent epidemics is that by focusing on specific microbial pathogens—whether Ebola, SARS, or Disease X—we risk missing the bigger ecological picture. [...]it is only when tropical rain forests are degraded by clear-cutting, dislodging from their roosts the bats in which the Ebola virus is presumed to reside between epidemics, or when people hunt chimpanzees infected with the virus and butcher them for the table, that Ebola risks spilling over into humans.
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Spanish influenza redux: revisiting the mother of all pandemics
Edvard Munch, Selvportrett i spanskesyken (Self-Portrait with the Spanish Flu) Nasjonalmuseet for Kunst, Arkitektur og Design/The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design/Photographer: Børre Høstland At this point, I must plead mea culpa for I was one of those historians who, lamenting the pandemic's neglect by my colleagues, once promoted the notion that it had somehow been forgotten or excised from public memory. [...]there is the fact that, unlike today when 24/7 news channels and social media ensure that reports of new disease outbreaks are broadcast far and wide, in 1918 most of the belligerent countries suppressed news of the influenza for fear of panicking civilians. Perhaps the biggest mystery is not the dearth of emotional and cultural traces of the pandemic, but when and where influenza originated and why it proved so much more virulent than any other pandemic influenza virus before or since. [...]the late 1990s, historians thought there was little chance of medical researchers ever being able to answer these questions. Whether or not you agree with such sweeping claims—and many historians do not—it is hard not to see Spinney as the heir to Crosby, who set similar historical hares running with his controversial claim that by sickening US President Woodrow Wilson during the Versailles peace negotiations the influenza resulted in the US delegation abandoning Wilson's 14-point peace plan, opening the way to harsh reparations against Germany, thereby sowing the seeds for the rise of Nazism and the second great conflict of the 20th century (indeed, Crosby's book was originally titled Epidemic and Peace; it was only in the wake of the AIDs pandemic, that in 1989 it was reissued as America's Forgotten Pandemic).
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Superbugs and us
[...]the real stars of this show are the superbugs such as Staphylococcus aureus, the bacterium famed for its resistance to meticillin, and Neisseria gonorrhoeae, now resistant to penicillin, tetracycline and, increasingly, ciprofloxacin. [...]we learn that Enterococcus faecalis, a common soil organism, secretes a pheromone to attract other bacteria and pass on its DNA, while Acinetobacter baumannii achieves the same effect using hairlike grappling irons on its surface. Discovered in Japan in 1949, colistin is a last resort therapy for multidrug resistant Gram-negative bacteria, but the colistin-resistance mcr-1 gene has now been found in farm animals and people in more than 30 countries worldwide.
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