President Franklin Roosevelt was among the thousands of people who lived with permanent paralysis from polio. Polio, like COVID, could have devastating long-term effects even if you survived the initial infection. “People poop it out, and people get it on their hands and they make you a sandwich.” Polio is not spread through the air - transmission occurs from oral-oral infection (say, sharing a drinking glass), or by “what’s nicely called hand-fecal,” Paula Cannon, a virology professor at the USC Keck School of Medicine, told me. Polio was highly contagious: In a household with an infected adult or child, 90% to 100% of susceptible people would develop evidence in their blood of also having been infected. “Polio was every mother’s scourge,” Benjamin said. In 1952 alone, there were 57,628 reported cases of polio resulting in 3,145 deaths. There were more than 600,000 cases of polio in the United States in the 20th century, and nearly 60,000 deaths - a case fatality rate of 9.8%. Polio reached pandemic levels by the 1940s. Outbreaks occurred throughout the first half of the 20th century, primarily killing children and leaving many more paralyzed. How it started: The first documented polio epidemic in the United States was in 1894. (By the way, have you gotten your flu shot yet?) One strain may have been completely extinguished.Īs places reopen and people feel more confident about socializing and traveling again, the flu could make a calamitous comeback. Though business and school closures weren’t enough to stave off the devastating winter surge of COVID, the measures were sufficient to keep the flu at bay. That people were washing hands, working from home and socially distancing in the winter 2020 flu season likely contributed to the fact that it was a comparably light flu season. The regular seasonal flu is both less contagious and less deadly than COVID-19. Deaths have been between 12,000 and 52,000 people in the U.S. The normal seasonal flu usually kills less than 0.1% of people who contract it. It’s endemic, not a pandemic.Īs a society, we accept a certain amount of death from known diseases. We still have descendent strains of the Spanish flu floating around today. Ultimately, the virus went through a process called attenuation. Flu vaccines wouldn’t be developed until the 1930s and wouldn’t become widely available for another decade.
is 1.6% as of December 2021.) Roughly 675,000 people in America died out of a population of 103.2 million, a number recently surpassed by COVID-19 victims of a 2020 U.S. (Johns Hopkins University reports the COVID-19 case fatality rate in the U.S. A third of the world’s population was believed to have contracted the Spanish flu during that pandemic, and it had a case-fatality rate of as high as 10-20% globally and 2.5% in the United States. It torched through individual communities until it ran out of people to infect. So how did we, as a species, beat the Spanish flu? We didn’t. “It was a spooky time,” said Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Assn. Half the people who died of the flu in 1918 were in their 20s and 30s. If the flu did hit your town, it hit hard: A young person could wake up in the morning feeling well and be dead 24 hours later. There was “zero partisanship” over the virus, Barry said. The disease was so virulent and killed so many young people that if you heard, “‘This is just ordinary influenza by another name,’ you knew that was a lie,” said John Barry, the author of “The Great Influenza.” It was a particularly deadly strain of H1N1 influenza and first took root in the U.S. How it started: Unclear, but probably not in Spain.
0 kommentar(er)
