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Contents contributed and discussions participated by Adam Bell

Adam Bell

Spanish flu mystery: Why don't scientists understand the 1918 flu even after digging up... - 1 views

  • Ninety-five years ago in the little town of Brevig Mission, Alaska, a deadly new virus called Spanish influenza struck quickly and brutally. It killed 90 percent of the town’s Inuit population, leaving scores of corpses that few survivors were willing to touch.
  • The miners arrived in Brevig Mission shortly after the medical calamity, tossed the victims into a pit two meters deep, and covered them with permafrost.
  • The flu victims remained untouched until 1951, when a team of scientists dug up the bodies, cracked open four cadavers’ rib cages, scooped out chunks of their lungs, and studied the tissue in a lab.
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  • Spanish influenza killed about 50 million people (estimates vary), including 675,000 in the United States, and up to 40 percent of the world’s population was stricken with the flu.
  • Nearly 50 years later, scientists dug up another victim from the same site, this time a better preserved, mostly frozen, obese woman, and successfully extracted viral RNA. In 2005, a team of scientists finally completed the project, sequencing the full genome of the viral RNA. But they still don’t know exactly why it caused the Spanish flu pandemic.   
  • Horrifying as the flu was, its reign of terror was mercifully brief: By late 1919, the flu had largely disappeared. Although its survivors and their children faced lifelong health problems, those dark years were largely struck from cultural memory.
  • Scientists, however, never forgot the mysterious pandemic, and research into the 1918 flu experienced something of a renaissance in recent years. In addition to the exhumed Inuit, scientists have studied the organs of flu-suffering soldiers, including a long-forgotten piece of lung tissue stored at a military pathology institute in Washington.
Adam Bell

The Deadly Virus: The Influenza Epidemic of 1918 - 0 views

    • Adam Bell
       
      The plague emerged in two phases. In late spring of 1918, the first phase, known as the "three-day fever," appeared without warning. 
Adam Bell

1918 Flu Pandemic That Killed 50 Million Originated in China, Historians Say - 0 views

  • The global flu outbreak of 1918 killed 50 million people worldwide, ranking as one of the deadliest epidemics in history.
  • The deadly "Spanish flu" claimed more lives than World War I, which ended the same year the pandemic struck. Now, new research is placing the flu's emergence in a forgotten episode of World War I: the shipment of Chinese laborers across Canada in sealed train cars.
Adam Bell

.:The Great pandemic :: The United States in 1918-1919 :. . : The Great Pandemic : : Th... - 1 views

  • The Influenza Pandemic occurred in three waves in the United States throughout 1918 and 1919.
Adam Bell

1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic -- The Spanish Flu That Killed Millions in 1918 - 0 views

  • three waves, the Spanish flu spread quickly, killing an estimated 50 million to 100 million people around the world. Dates: March 1918 to spring 1919
  • This new, deadlier flu acted very strangely; it seemed to target the young and healthy, being particularly deadly to 20 to 35 year olds. This deadly flu spread quickly around the world, infecting hundreds of millions of people and killing upwards of 5 percent of the world's population.
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    lost of people.
Adam Bell

1918 Flu Pandemic - Facts & Summary - HISTORY.com - 1 views

  • The influenza or flu pandemic of 1918 to 1919, the deadliest in modern history, infected an estimated 500 million people worldwide–about one-third of the planet’s population at the time–and killed an estimated 20 million to 50 million victims. More than 25 percent of the U.S. population became sick, and some 675,000 Americans died during the pandemic.
Adam Bell

Influenza 1918 . American Experience . WGBH | PBS - 0 views

  • The worst epidemic in American history killed over 600,000 Americans during World War I. Nicknamed "Spanish influenza," it died out quickly the following winter.
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