There has been a lot of speculation on why so many young adults died from the 1918 flu, as well as the very young and elderly, which is more typical. Couldn’t the answer be simply because a lot more young adults caught the flu, given that it ran rampent through the military personnel? In fact, didn’t this flu start at a military base? Military forces are overwhelmingly young adults.
Please let me know if I am thinking about this all wrong. Has anyone shown that a young adult who caught the flu was actually more likely to die than a person of a different age? Or, is it how I understand it to be, that simply a lot of young adult people died from the 1918 flu.
1. Flu was everywhere, and 2. healthy adults shouldn’t die in these numbers. The flu may have started in the camps, and certainly the camps made things worse for age 20–29 year olds (the middle peak of the W) in terms of spread, but no way should so many have died.
Don’t forget, this is also in comparison to other years. Dr. Osterholm’s pp presentaion on this page has a slide comparing 1912–1916 with 1918… 20–29 year olds died 178 times more frequently in the pandemic, even though some of the previous years were war years as well.
Why is this so—why do the 20–35 year old age group (or whatever the age specifically is) die more ?
I think that one of the answers is that with some types of flu the most serious reactions, the ones that cause death, are due to a runaway immune system reactions that work like a feedback loop. So perhaps the people with the strongest immune systems would be the most likely to have these reactions.
There are a number of scientists that believe that the soldiers were given the flu by the new, particularly toxic, untested vaccines that they received when they arrived at the bases. Some soldiers just dropped dead right away and others were sick from the flu and it spread from there. The vaccines also account for people all over the world who received the vaccines that the US sold or donated to various countries. A google search will turn up sites and studies that support this viewpoint.
I appreciate the responses so far and the link to Dr. Osterholm’s presentation. I would still be very interested if anyone has a reference that breaks down the death RATE by age or has the number of flu cases broken down by age for the 1918 flu. Does this exist? I’m thinking that these numbers either don’t exist or would be guesswork.
Can you tell that I’m still not convinced that the death rate for young adults was higher than other age groups? I appreciate your patience with my questions.
PeggyS
The above is untrue historical fact. The only vaccine being used was against the bacterium hemophilus influenza, not against the virus (which was, in 1918, not known to be the cause of flu). Scientists of they day were exhaustively trying to help any way they could, and come out looking far better than the politicians in retrospect.
More details can be found in John Barry’s book “The Great Influenza”. Put your citations up for review.
http://www.whale.to/v/spanish_flu.html
I am not saying that I believe this theory, however I don’t neccessarily believe what is in the mainstream media regarding the Spanish flu either. I pointed it out to possibly explain why so many young adults contracted and died from the flu in 1918.
peggy, download the osterholm power point presentation and look at slide number 14. the data is here.
Thank you DemFromCT. I was just about to post that I finally found what I was looking for here: www.hhs.gov/nvpo/meetings/PowerPoints/ShayNVACpanflu4-20-05.ppt
It has slides showing case rates and fatality rates per 100 cases, broken out by age groups. Very interesting stuff. Ages 5 to 9 and 10 to 14 had the highest case rates of all age groups (NOT young adults as I had speculated). Other than infants under 1 and elderly over 65, the fatality rate per 100 cases was highest for adults 25 to 29, followed by 30–34, 35–40, and then 20–24.
Tracy, thanks for the references. The first one is just plain wrong for reasons as as noted above. You can’t confuse ‘vaccines are bad’ (debatable in the extreme) with ‘vaccines caused the problem in 1918′ (when there was no viral flu vaccine in 1918) the way the author does and expect to be taken seriously.
PeggyS, I repaired the link. Copy and paste into browser to download the slide set.
I’m reading “the great influenza” now. I don’t recommend it unless you suffer from boredom. Too lengthy, no tables, no statistics. Few info how to use these experiences in a possible new pandemic and this info is hard to find. You are supposed to read the whole 500 pages , which rakes many hours. It also concentrates on USA too much. OK, I found some useful things, though. First the vaccine was against pneumonia (page 218) and it worked pretty well, but it was in short supply. Second, pandemics was worst in non-war 3rd world and they had the same age-pattern and even higher death-rates. Third, it seems that indeed infection before onset of first symptoms was common (e.g.:page 212ff) (the Geneva study said asymptomatic transmission was rare) Fouth, the elderly were not immune because of the 1889 pandemic, they assume they might have been immunized by some other mild pandemic. Fifth, ARDS only very partially explains the age-distribution of deaths. Other factors (which?) are supposed to be more dominant.
I forgot: most of those who had caught it in the first mild wave were immun in the 2nd wave. But not all. E.g. politician House got in in all 3 waves . So it might have been a good strategy to deliberately catch it in the first wave. Also, even those who recovered from the 2nd wave often had some nerval or brain damage
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