The 1918 Influenza Pandemic

choi

Edward Kosner, A World of Sickness. The Spanish flu of 1918-19 infected 500 million people, killing between 50 and 100 million. Its cause was discovered only decades later. Wall Street Journal, Dec 11, 2017
https://www.wsj.com/articles/rev ... sickness-1512938536
(book review on Laura Spinney, Pale Rider. The Spanish flu of 1918 and how it changed the world. PublicAffairs, 2017)

Quote:

"the disease had already broken out in the Americas and in the World War I trenches in France. Learning the scourge across the border [in Spain], the French labeled it 'the Spanish flu,' and, despite all evidence [that the flu did not originate or was worse in Spain] to the contrary, the name stuck.

"More American service members died of the flu than from fighting the war. It engulfed tiny Iceland and sprawling India * * *

"The frantic search for the pandemic was nightmarish, too. A respected researcher persuaded himself and others that he had found the bacillus, he persisted even though autopsies rarely turned up his pet suspect in the tissues of the dead. The microbe hunters couldn't find their quarry through the ultrafine strainers they tried to catch it wit, and it was invisible to their microscopes. * * * Eventually a virus -- 1/20th the size of a bacillus -- was identified as the culprit. It was not actually seen until decades later with the invention of the electron microscope.

Note:
(a)
(i) The Spanish flu is H1N1.
(ii) I introduced this book before, probably from a review in Economist. There is no need to read the rest of the WSJ review.

(b) About quotation 1.
(i) Tim Clarke Jr, Pandemic, 1918. Military Medicine, 181: 941-942 (2016)
https://academic.oup.com/milmed/article/181/8/941/4158380  
("In 1918, an exceptionally deadly strain of influenza killed between 21 and 50 million people worldwide. The pandemic swept through the United States at the height of this country's mobilization for World War I and killed 43,000 American service members, roughly 40% of all US war dead. Over 25% of the US population contracted the illness and approximately 675,000 civilians died")
(ii) Assistant Secretary of Defense, Department of Defense Guidance for Preparation and Response to an Influenza Pandemic Caused by the Bird Flu (Avian Influenza). Sept 21, 2004
https://wss.apan.org/432/Files/E ... ndemic_Sep%2004.pdf
("Usually, there are between 3,000 and 20,000 deaths per year due to pneumonia deaths in the United States that can be attributed to influenza. In the 1918 pandemic, there were 546,000 deaths in the United States, or over 25 times more deaths than in a typical year. This mortality figure includes 43,000 uniformed soldiers who were mobilized for World War I. During the 1918 pandemic, about 1 in 20 persons in the 18 to 50 year-old ago group, the age of the vast majority of military personnel, died during a 10-week epidemic")

(c) About quotation 3. Take notice "he had found the bacillus" -- that is, before the 1918 pandemic.
(i) Richard Pfeiffer or Richard Friedrich Johannes Pfeiffer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Friedrich_Johannes_Pfeiffer
(1858 – 1945; German physician; "In 1892 he isolated what he thought was the causative agent of influenza * * * which was later called Haemophilus influenzae. Few doubted the validity of this discovery")
(ii) tobacco mosaic virus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_mosaic_virus

Quote: "Tobacco mosaic virus was the first virus to be crystallized. It was achieved by Wendell Meredith Stanley [An American man; Meredith is a Welsh surname derived from personal name; recently Meredith Corp -- founded by Edwin Thomas Meredith  in 1902 -- proposed to buy Time, Inc] in 1935 who also showed that TMV remains active even after crystallization. For his work, he was awarded 1/3 of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1946, even though it was later shown some of his conclusions (in particular, that the crystals were pure protein [actually there is RNA -- not DNA -- core inside the proteinaceous coat], and assembled by autocatalysis) were incorrect.[7] The first electron microscopical images of TMV were made in 1939 by Gustav Kausche, Edgar Pfankuch and Helmut Ruska [all West Germans]  – the brother of Nobel Prize winner Ernst Ruska [German physicist who invented commercial electron microscope while working for Siemens]." (citations omitted)
(iii)
(A) Haemophilus influenzae
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haemophilus_influenzae
("The bacterium was mistakenly considered to be the cause of influenza until 1933 when the viral cause of influenza became apparent"/ section Diseases: does NOT cause influenza)
(B) Haemophilus influenzae. American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language. 5th ed. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishin Co, 2016.
https://www.thefreedictionary.com/Haemophilus+influenzae
(pronunciation)