Influenza

Influenza, a highly contagious viral disease marked by fever, muscular aches, respiratory inflammation, and, in severe cases, bronchitis and pneumonia. Although the evidence is sketchy, influenza may have arrived in America in 1493 with the New World's first pigs, a species with whom human beings share the disease. Influenza pandemics, spreading from Europe, swept Anglo‐America in 1732 and 1781–1782. The nineteenth century brought more outbreaks, the worst in 1889–1890. Millions of Americans fell ill, but as in all known influenza outbreaks except for one, few died, and those who did were mostly the young and the old. During the next pandemic, in 1918–1919, however, the death rate was several times higher than that of any influenza outbreak before or since, and half the victims were young adults. This “flu” epidemic killed about 30 million worldwide, including 550,000 Americans—more than ten times the number of U.S. soldiers who died in World War I.

In the early 1930s, the Americans Richard E. Shope and Paul A. Lewis and the Britishers Wilson Smith, C.H. Andrewes, and P.P. Laidlaw isolated the influenza virus and transmitted it to and recovered it from laboratory animals. In the 1940s, other researchers produced influenza vaccines, which unfortunately proved only ephemerally effective. By the 1990s, a network of stations existed around the globe to report new strains of influenza to the World Health Organization in hope of giving humanity enough warning to defend itself. In 1976, a strain of influenza virus resembling that of 1918 appeared in New Jersey, prompting the U.S. government to spend millions of dollars to produce and distribute a vaccine. The feared pandemic never happened. As the twentieth century ended, there was no known cure for influenza and no certainty that an outbreak comparable to the 1918 pandemic, whose severity still remained a mystery, could not happen again.
See also Medicine; Public Health.

Bibliography

K. David Patterson , Pandemic Influenza, 1700–1900, 1986.
Alfred W. Crosby , America's Forgotten Pandemic, 1989.
Gina Bari Kolata , Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus that Caused It, 1999.

Alfred W. Crosby