Do those transfusions help?

The New Neo Posted on by

Maybe those blood transfusions from recovered ebola patient Dr. Kent Brantly are the ticket:

Two Americans have already been treated successfully for Ebola. Dr. Kent Brantly is one. He is providing blood for other victims, on the theory that it contains antibodies with which the body can fight the disease. A patient who received such a transfusion reportedly has fully recovered and another reportedly is making great progress.

And Nina Pham, who also received a transfusion from Brantly, is reported to be in fair to good condition.

So far, all the patients Brantly has helped transfuse have recovered. This is an extremely small “n,” though, so it’s impossible to draw conclusions from it. It could be that these patients are actually doing well because their disease was diagnosed and treated unusually early, and that the transfusions didn’t change its course. Or, it may be that they will take a turn for the worse later. But the trend is a good one.

It is reported that Brantly made the same offer for Thomas Eric Duncan, but that he didn’t receive a transfusion because he was not a match. Duncan was also diagnosed very late in the game, due to Dallas Presbyterian’s failure to recognize that he had ebola on his first ER visit. We’ll never know whether things would have been different for Duncan if he’d been treated earlier.

Here’s Brantly:


More ABC news videos | ABC Health News

[NOTE: Some research on the subject of ebola immunity transfusions in animals can be found here. And here’s why there hasn’t been much research on the topic so far.]

The antidote

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a clip of the finale of Paul Taylor’s “Esplanade,” one of the most beautiful dances I’ve ever seen. I’ve written at length about Taylor before, and about “Esplanade” in particular:

If I write that in one of my favorite works of his—”Esplanade”—he eschews conventional dance steps and uses movements that derive almost entirely from natural everyday motions such as walking, running, and falling, it sounds boring. But Taylor transforms these steps into one of the most exhilarating and joyous dances ever created, one that at times exhibits an almost sublime tenderness, and at other times makes the audience gasp with its bold daring, lightning speed, and the dancers’ sheer physical power as they hurl themselves with reckless abandon into each others’ arms and then down to the floor and up again.

That “hurl themselves with reckless abandon into each others’ arms” part begins at about 4:09, by the way. Note, also, that Taylor makes tremendous use of the floor—not just to stand on or take off from, but as a vehicle for the entire body to drop and fall to, roll on, and then rise from. That’s a hallmark of modern dance—as opposed to the more airborne ballet—of which “Esplanade” takes full advantage.

Enjoy:

I also love, love, love, that beginning movement of the excerpt, where the first dancer starts to move just before the music, but perfectly complements it.

Obama appointing longtime Democratic political operative as ebola czar

The New Neo Posted on by

Hey, that’ll work!:

President Obama has asked Ron Klain, who served as chief of staff to both Vice President Biden and former vice president Al Gore, as his Ebola response coordinator, according to a White House official.

“He will report directly to the president’s homeland security adviser, Lisa Monaco, and the president’s national security adviser, Susan Rice, as he ensures that efforts to protect the American people by detecting, isolating and treating Ebola patients in this country are properly integrated but don’t distract from the aggressive commitment to stopping Ebola at the source in West Africa,” a White House official wrote in an e-mail.

Klain, a longtime Democratic operative, served as Biden’s chief of staff from 2009 to 2011 and as Gore’s from 1995 to 1999. He helped oversee the Democratic side in the 2000 presidential election recount as its lead lawyer, a role that Kevin Spacey portrayed in the HBO film “Recount.”

In other words, he will not challenge the administration in any way, and will mouth the party line to reassure the proles that all is in the very best of hands.

No experience except for the political. And the following [emphasis mine] is really a masterpiece in gracefully laconic understatement by the WaPo. My hat is off to the article’s authors:

Klain is not known for his health-care expertise, though he would get briefings on those policies in his capacity as a campaign strategist for Gore and the Democrats’ 2004 presidential candidate, John Kerry.

On the other hand, the doctors who’ve been dealing with this so far, such as Frieden, have been so bad at it that perhaps a complete naif would be better. If a person were organized, smart, independent, and honest it could work. But Klain’s status as party operative makes the “independent and honest” part pretty much an impossibility.

[ADDENDUM: More here from Ron Fournier. Excerpt:

13. Klain can’t be a disruptively productive force without autonomy. I have to ask: How many senior White House officials, including the president, have ever created an organization chart? Anybody with a rudimentary understanding of management would know that you don’t untangle a chain of command by injecting a new figure haphazardly into it. The answer is to put somebody atop it. Which brings me back to my first sentence, and the real problem here.

14. We shouldn’t need an Ebola czar. The president needs to do his job better.

It depends, however, what the president thinks his job is.]

Does the lack of a ban on travel from West Africa…

The New Neo Posted on by

…mean that Dinesh D’Souza was right in The Roots of Obama’s Rage? In the book, he describes how one of Obama’s biggest motivations is his hatred of colonialism in Africa, and a desire to redress and/or revenge its wrongs for his father’s sake:

In his own writings Obama stresses the centrality of his father not only to his beliefs and values but to his very identity. He calls his memoir “the record of a personal, interior journey”“a boy’s search for his father and through that search a workable meaning for his life as a black American.” And again, “It was into my father’s image, the black man, son of Africa, that I’d packed all the attributes I sought in myself.” Even though his father was absent for virtually all his life, Obama writes, “My father’s voice had nevertheless remained untainted, inspiring, rebuking, granting or withholding approval. You do not work hard enough, Barry. You must help in your people’s struggle. Wake up, black man!”

The climax of Obama’s narrative is when he goes to Kenya and weeps at his father’s grave. It is riveting: “When my tears were finally spent,” he writes, “I felt a calmness wash over me. I felt the circle finally close. I realized that who I was, what I cared about, was no longer just a matter of intellect or obligation, no longer a construct of words. I saw that my life in America”“the black life, the white life, the sense of abandonment I’d felt as a boy, the frustration and hope I’d witnessed in Chicago”“all of it was connected with this small piece of earth an ocean away, connected by more than the accident of a name or the color of my skin. The pain that I felt was my father’s pain.”

In an eerie conclusion, Obama writes that “I sat at my father’s grave and spoke to him through Africa’s red soil.” In a sense, through the earth itself, he communes with his father and receives his father’s spirit. Obama takes on his father’s struggle, not by recovering his body but by embracing his cause. He decides that where Obama Sr. failed, he will succeed. Obama Sr.’s hatred of the colonial system becomes Obama Jr.’s hatred; his botched attempt to set the world right defines his son’s objective. Through a kind of sacramental rite at the family tomb, the father’s struggle becomes the son’s birthright.

And also on the topic of West African travel bans, here’s an article in Politico that purports to tell us travel ban advocates just why what we’re proposing isn’t a good idea.

Only thing is, the geniuses there make several major errors. The first is to completely misunderstand (or purposely misrepresent) what is being advocated, which is not a complete travel ban but merely a ban on West African nationals coming from there to this country on commercial flights—in other words, a denial of visas to that group of people. The second is the sophistic trick of saying that because something doesn’t stop the problem entirely, it’s worthless—ignoring the idea of slowing down or diminishing the problem. A third problem is that, like our condescending public officials in the public health game, they merely assert that “the reality, the experts say, is that those kinds of measures have failed before.”

Well, hey, if the experts say it, that’s good enough for me! No need to tell me where those measures have been tried, what they consisted of, and how failure was measured, and let me see whether I think there’s any analogy to the present situation that makes sense. I won’t bother my pretty little head about the details.

It’s not all fun and games for the mosquito, either

The New Neo Posted on by

As a response to my recent mosquito post, commenter “cornflour” has sent in a link to the article “Cosmic Karma: Mosquitoes Have Flying, Blood-Sucking Parasites of Their Own”:

Although it’s oh-so-satisfying to hear mosquitoes have their own blood-sucking winged pests (though ponder for a moment that, scaled to our size, their parasites would be about the size of dinner plates, and unlike us, mosquitoes have nothing to whack them with), we may ultimately be losers in the business as well. The host range of C. anophelis, like its geographic range, is enormous. It has been found to parasitize at least 19 species of mosquito, but it has also been collected sucking blood directly from buffaloes and cattle.

Culicoides midges are known carriers of bluetongue virus, Oropouche virus and Schmallenburg virus while mosquitoes they parasitize carry Dengue, West Nile, and Japanese encephalitis viruses. If mosquitoes are flying dirty syringes that spread disease among humans, parasitic midges may further scramble the disease load, introduce new viruses to new vectors, and generally add another order of magnitude to disease transmission calculus. But no one really knows. The studies, as authors of this paper point out, have yet to be done.

Well, well, well.

The news should remind us all that life imitates art. This sort of thing was imagined quite some time ago:

Big fleas have little fleas,
Upon their backs to bite ’em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas,
and so, ad infinitum.

Which has a provenance that goes back almost three hundred years, to Jonathan Swift, no less:

The vermin only teaze and pinch
Their foes superior by an inch.
So, naturalists observe, a flea
Has smaller fleas that on him prey;
And these have smaller still to bite ’em,
And so proceed ad infinitum.

It’s the idiocracy, stupid

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Mrs Whatsit” notes that “We are witnessing a spectacle of incompetence on multiple levels of government not quite like anything I recall before,” and asks whether there are any competent adults left.

A few, but I think they might be mostly older, relics from another age, when competence was rewarded (at least, much of the time) and incompetence penalized. I have come to the conclusion that “Idiocracy” has arrived, and this statement of mine isn’t just the usual whining of the older generation towards the younger.

Of course, some of what passes for incompetence is deliberate sabotage. But most is not, IMHO. For one thing, it’s too enormously widespread. Something is going on, and it’s much bigger than just the government. I encounter remarkable incompetence over and over in everyday life, to an extent I can never recall—on the phone, in the stores, on the street, on TV, everywhere.

Is it the decline of the educational system? Affirmative action hiring? Too many drugs taken in childhood? Drugs taken by parents? Is it computer-driven? Entertainment-driven? The decline of family and parental involvement? Cultural devaluation of thought and learning? For too many people, is English a poorly-learned second language?

If you look at the list I’ve given in above paragraph, there’s little question that much (although not all) of it has been a result of leftist policies and dominance of our educational and cultural life. The effects have been extremely pervasive, though, and have transcended political affiliation.

Obama and the failure to protect

The New Neo Posted on by

One of the most glaring hallmarks of the Obama administration is its failure to protect the American people and their representatives. I don’t mean a failure to protect perfectly and completely—that can never be accomplished. I mean the failure to even attempt certain of the basics of protection, and the eagerness to withdraw protection where it once existed.

The motives for this come down to the old “fool/knave” question, although the answer is almost certainly “knave.” What particular sort of knave is Obama in this regard? Is it his leftism, or his anger at America and desire to humble it, or PC considerations, or a drive to increase Democratic power (i.e. encouraging illegal immigration) that is the driving force behind the failure to protect? Or some or all of the above?

If you look at this entire administration and its history, you can view many if not most of Obama’s initiatives in the light of failure to protect. He was elected in a time a great economic peril, and early on promised to “focus like a laser” on the economy and to keep “pivoting” towards it, but that never happened. In fact, he seemed instead to spearhead legislation and policies that actually would harm the economy (Obamacare, cap and trade, anti-coal programs). Regarding Obamacare itself, he promised to protect Americans’ relationships with their doctors, hospitals, and health insurance policies, and instead began to destroy all of that. In 2011 he failed to negotiate or even try to negotiate a deal with the Iraqi government that would leave some American forces there to protect our hard-won investment of blood and treasure, as well as our interests in the region. Right before the 2012 election, the Benghazi killings reflected his refusal to protect the embassy and its people.

After 2012, the problem accelerated, if such a thing were possible. The Bergdahl swap freed five important and dangerous Taliban in exchange for a deserter. The rescue of James Foley was botched or not even really attempted, and Foley’s beheading gave a ghastly and human graphic to Obama’s failure to protect. The rise of ISIS, likewise, in an escalating horror show. And then there’s ebola. Need I say more?

Americans will forgive a lot, and in the case of Obama they have forgiven way too much. He should never have been re-elected, but he was, in part because of this tendency to forgive. I keep thinking (or at least hoping) that the American people may have passed the point of forgiving him and I’ve been disappointed before, but this time it feels different. It feels as though many more people (including many former supporters) are disgusted with, and much alarmed by, Obama’s behavior.

Too little, too late. And unfortunately, much of this feeling is specific to their view of Obama himself, who is increasingly seen as being “in over his head” rather than mistaken in a deeper way or actively malevolent. Nor do they extend their judgment to the left in general, whom they probably will be only to happy to vote for in 2016.

Is anyone competent in charge these days?

The New Neo Posted on by

Or, alternatively, is anyone in charge competent these days?

For example:

Dallas Ebola patient Amber Vinson contacted the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before boarding a commercial flight Monday because she had a slight fever, a federal government spokesperson told NBC News Wednesday.

“Vinson was not told that she could not fly,” the government spokesperson told NBC News.

Note, please, the double negative.

Vinson had been self-monitoring and was reporting her temperature to CDC epidemiology teams routinely…

According to the government spokesperson, when Vinson called in, the staff she talked with looked on the CDC website for guidance. At the time, the category for “uncertain risk” had guidance saying that a person could fly commercially if they did not meet the threshold of a temperature of 100.4.

So, Vinson was reporting back to people at the CDC who had to look at a website.

I’ve looked at that website within the past few days, too. I’m not going to even bother to check it again right now, because I’m pretty sure I recall that it discusses symptoms and risk level and that Vinson, as a person who took care of a known ebola patient in the final stages of his illness (or, actually, at any stage of illness), ought to be considered high risk, not “unknown risk.” And if I’m wrong about what the website actually says about that, it’s hard to believe the website is correct. After all, what could be higher risk than nursing a critically ill ebola patient? Nursing him with no protective garments at all?

Then there’s also that borderline fever thing that I’ve been screeching about for over a week, saying that lower fevers should be considered evidence of ebola infection in a person who has had close contact with an ebola patient. I guess the CDC begs to differ.

Again, though, it is probable that Ms. Vinson was not especially contagious yet when she flew on the plane. But no one should have advised her that she could take the risk of doing so (or “not told her she could not fly”).

This is beyond upsetting.

[ADDENDUM: The commenters at Ace’s manage to find some humor in the situation.]

Correcting the record on the Iraq War: why it’s preaching to the choir

The New Neo Posted on by

Gabriel Malor at Ace’s has written a post attempting to correct the NY Times‘ latest fable about the Iraq War, the lead-up to it, and what Bush’s argument for the commencement of the war was based on.

Malor does an excellent job and my hat is off to him. But I have a problem with his post, one that’s not in the least his fault.

Who is motivated to read it? People who know these things already. Who else would even try to read it? No one I know except the already-convinced. Even if others were to urge them to read it, I doubt they would, if my liberal friends and acquaintances are typical (and I believe they are).

Malor points out that although the NY Times is flat-out lying about what Bush said before the war, intelligent people who ought to know better are swallowing that lie hook line and sinker:

I am flabbergasted at the number of people who immediately repeated this lie on Twitter who I know were alive and well and watching the run-up to the Iraq War, just like me.

So, why don’t people remember the facts? I can think of plenty of reasons. They reject facts that don’t conform with their political viewpoints. And/or they probably didn’t follow the details closely in the first place: BOR-ING. Or, if they did follow them closely at the time, they don’t remember much, like the content of a course they took years ago. Maybe they even crammed for the final, but they forgot almost all of it when the final was over and they didn’t need to know it anymore. And then, ever since that final, imagine that they’ve also been crammed full of information that contradicted what they originally had learned for the test. Then they would be even less likely to remember correctly. In fact, the later information would probably crowd out the earlier.

This happens very frequently. That’s why the press is so extraordinarily important. Most people tend to read it receptively rather than critically. That’s why the press is such an excellent vehicle for propaganda. That’s why a commitment to honesty and truth in the press is essential for a free and informed citizenry.

Because most people will make the minimum effort at informing themselves. Life just contains too much else that’s more fun, or that gives them more rewards, or that is a time-consuming and necessary obligation, or that tires them out. Learning the details of Bush’s speeches and his rationale for the Iraq War just isn’t one of the most compelling things for most people, nor is remembering what they’ve learned, and it won’t ever be.

That’s not to say that efforts such as Malor’s should not be undertaken. They should, and must. But bridging that attention gap is much harder than a mere presentation of facts, however convincing they might be.

Second Dallas health worker diagnosed with ebola

The New Neo Posted on by

It is crystal clear that we were woefully unprepared for the inevitable first case of ebola coming to our shores.

Some fatal combination of arrogance, ignorance, negligence, recklessness, stupidity, political correctness (some would add “evil intent”), and irresponsibility has led to hospital workers being exposed to, and contracting, the disease.

This news will make it more difficult to continue to blame the workers (although, where there’s a will there’s a way):

A bleary-eyed Dr. Daniel Varga, the hospital’s chief clinical officer, called the second worker’s infection “an unprecedented crisis” at an early monrning news conference.

The woman was among 76 hospital workers who cared for Duncan, a Liberian citizen who died from Ebola at Texas Health Presbyterian a week ago…

It wasn’t immediately known how the second worker contracted the disease, but Varga said, “It’s clear there was an exposure somewhere, sometime in their treatment of Mr. Duncan.”

“We’re a hospital that may have done some things different with the benefit of what we know today,” he said. “Make no mistake, no one wants to get this right more than our hospital.”

“May have done things different”?

The way health care workers in Dallas were instructed on handling the first ebola patient diagnosed in the US appears to have been an absolute outrage. Read the whole thing; it’s too lengthy, and the allegations of problems too numerous, to fully appreciate through excerpts.

But the problems are hardly limited to the hospital. The administration has failed to put in place the very first line of defense by refusing to halt commercial travel of non-citizens, to at least buy us a little time. The CDC has been inadequate in its directives, training, and preparedness as well. The hospital, faced with a terrible crises, should have acknowledged its own inability to deal with it and either demanded that Duncan be flown in strict isolation to a more specialized facility that cared for patients such as Dr. Kent Brantly (in my opinion, the best way to have dealt with it), or gone into 24-hour-a-day war mode figuring out how best to immediately mobilize so that every required safety precaution was fully in place.

Note the order of my list. The hospital comes last; the others are more culpable. But hospitals are the bottom line here, and that is true of every hospital in the US. I doubt that more that a couple (if that) would have dealt with Duncan’s care all that much better, although I think (and sincerely hope) that many would have done much better with his initial diagnosis.

The entire system of dealing with this is deeply deeply flawed, and based on false premises. And those false premises were in turn based on a significant amount of hubris, among other problems. Things to question (besides the very obvious, the lack of travel restrictions): just about everything, including mode and place of diagnosis (mobile diagnostic unit? special centers? educating the public better?) and of course the protocols for protective suits and their removal, disposal of waste, and number of workers seeing patients.

Meanwhile, at least until now, the stance of public officials has been to blandly reassure in order to allay fear. But the only effect this has had has been a growing and justified distrust of the authorities.

[ADDENDUM: The fact that Amber Vinson, the second nurse in the US to contract ebola, got on a commercial flight knowing she had a temperature of about 100 is astounding under the circumstances. Was it, once again, the idea that a fever under 101.5 doesn’t matter—when in fact it’s been demonstrated over and over recently that in someone who’s been exposed to ebola a lower fever is very meaningful as well?

That said, I actually don’t think it very likely that anyone on the plane, or anyone who was in merely casual contact with Ms. Vinson prior to her isolation, will contract ebola. Of course, if I’d been on that plane, I’d be terrified right now. But in reality, I don’t think anyone will catch it, for the simple reason that when someone has ebola but has a low-grade fever as their only symptom, I think that their contagiousness, although not zero, is still very very low. The contagiousness of the disease rises exponentially as symptoms develop. Once the victim is vomiting and has diarrhea and/or bleeding, he/she is becoming very dangerous indeed. Till then, much less so.

The fact that (so far, at least—and I fervently hope it stays that way) none of Duncan’s pre-hospital contacts have come down with the disease is pretty much the only good news in this whole sorry mess.]

Ebola and the great forgetting: the best of times, the worst of times

The New Neo Posted on by

WHO director Margaret Chan said yesterday that the current ebola epidemic is “the most severe, acute health emergency seen in modern times.”

On the one hand, I’m happy that WHO is taking the outbreak very seriously. On the other hand, the statement puzzles me. It either indicates a problem that’s merely semantic and involves a disagreement over the definition of a historical term, “modern times,” or it could mean that Chan is ignorant of the history of one of the greatest pandemics the world has ever known, the 1918-1919 influenza strain.

If the problem is just a disagreement between Chan and me on what the term “modern times” means, than no harm, no foul, no problem. But if Chan actually considers “modern times” to include the WWI era, and is ignorant of the scope and course of the great flu pandemic towards the end of that war, it would be exceptionally troubling, since she is speaking in her role as director of one of the most influential worldwide institutions tasked with dealing with epidemics.

An early post I wrote on this blog was called “The tsunami and the forgetting.” It pointed out the tendency of humans to forget and ignore—or to only vaguely learn about—extremely cataclysmic events. The event I described the world as having “forgotten” was that 1918-1919 influenza pandemic, and I quoted the transcript of an NPR show that dealt with the forgetting and how it worked for that event. Whatever is the case with Dr. Chan, it makes sense right now to take another look, in light of ebola and what we fear it might do:

William Sardo: People didn’t want to believe that they could be healthy in the morning and dead by nightfall, they didn’t want to believe that.

Narrator: It was the worst epidemic this country has ever known. It killed more Americans than all the wars this century ”” combined.

Lee Reay: It was a phantom. We didn’t know where it was.

William Maxwell: In a gradual remorseless way, it kept moving closer and closer.

Daniel Tonkel: You never knew from day to day who was going to be next on the death list.

Dr. Shirley Fannin, Epidemiologist: There were so many people dying that you ran out of things that you’d never considered running out of before ”” caskets.

Narrator: Before it was over, it almost broke America apart….

Read the whole thing. I’m not recommending it because I think ebola is exactly like that or will be quite like that, either in its mechanism of spread or its ultimate death toll (although, worst case scenario, by the time ebola is through it could conceivably rival it or even surpass it). I’m recommending it because 1918-1919 is by almost any historical definition “modern times,” and because the pandemic represented an overwhelmingly “severe, acute health emergency”—more so than ebola, at least so far.

On the forgetting:

Dr. Alfred Crosby, author, America’s Forgotten Pandemic: The first reaction of the authorities was, for many of the most important ones was just flat-out denial. They didn’t know what was happening, they didn’t know what to do and, therefore, they did the human thing which is to say it’s not happening.

Narrator: With the war escalating, federal officials continued to put Americans at risk. One September day, they called 13 million young men to register for the draft. The men jammed together in school houses, city halls, post offices.

Dr. Alfred Crosby, author, America’s Forgotten Pandemic: There were two enormously important things going on at once and they were at right angles to each other. One, of course, was the influenza epidemic, which dictated that you should sort of shut everything down and the war which demanded that everything should speed up, that certainly the factories should continue operating, you should continue to have bond drives, soldiers should be put on boats and sent off to France. It’s as if we could, as a society, only contain one big idea at a time and the big idea was the war…

The epidemic was now a national crisis: something had to be done. In many places, officials rushed through laws requiring people to wear masks in public. All of America, it seemed, put on masks. At last, many thought, they were safe. But masks didn’t help. They were thin and porous ”” no serious restraint to tiny microbes. It was like trying to keep out dust with chicken wire.

In Washington, D.C., Commissioner Louis Brownlow banned all public gatherings. He closed the city’s schools, theaters and bars. He quarantined the sick. He did everything he had the power to do. But the death rate in Washington kept rising…

Dr. Alfred Crosby, author, America’s Forgotten Pandemic: Science knew next to nothing about viruses at this time. The optical microscopes they had couldn’t show you a virus, virus is much too small for them. Nobody would ever see virus until the electron microscope came along and that was decades after that. These poor scientists were looking for a needle in a haystack, when they didn’t know it was a needle they were looking for and the needle was too small for them to see. No wonder they didn’t find it…

Narrator: In 31 shocking days, the flu would kill over 195,000 Americans. It was the deadliest month in this nation’s history. Coffins were in such demand that they were often stolen. Undertakers had to place armed guards around their prized boxes. The orderly life of America began to break down. All over the country, farms and factories shut down ”” schools and churches closed. Homeless children wandered the streets, their parents vanished…

Dr. Alfred Crosby, author, America’s Forgotten Pandemic: The epidemic killed, at a very, very conservative estimate, 550,000 Americans in 10 months, that’s more Americans than died in combat in all the wars of this century, and the epidemic killed at least 30 million in the world and infected the majority of the human species.

Narrator: As soon as the dying stopped, the forgetting began.

Dr. Alfred Crosby, author, America’s Forgotten Pandemic: It is in the individual memory of a great many of us, but it’s not in our collective memory. That for me is the greatest mystery: how we could have forgotten anything so horrendous, so massively horrendous, as this, this epidemic which killed so many of us, killed us so fast and our reaction was to forget it.

Dr. Shirley Fannin, Epidemiologist: Why? Why wasn’t that part of our memory? Or of our history? I think it’s probably because it was so awful while it was happening, so frightening, that people just got rid of the memory. But it always lingers there. As a kind of an uneasiness. If it happened once before, what’s to say it’s not going to happen again. The more we find out about influenza virus, the more real that fear becomes.

The NPR show’s description of the horror wreaked by the flu was mostly limited to its effects in this country. But in many other areas it was even worse. To get an idea of the scope of the 1918-1919 pandemic’s global “severity” and “acuteness,” here are some figures:

Influenza may have killed as many as 25 million people in its first 25 weeks. Older estimates say it killed 40”“50 million people, while current estimates say 50”“100 million people worldwide were killed.

This pandemic has been described as “the greatest medical holocaust in history” and may have killed more people than the Black Death. It is said that this flu killed more people in 24 weeks than AIDS has killed in 24 years, more in a year than the Black Death killed in a century.

The disease killed in every corner of the globe. As many as 17 million died in India, about 5% of the population. The death toll in India’s British-ruled districts alone was 13.88 million. In Japan, 23 million people were affected, and 390,000 died. In the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), 1.5 million were assumed to have died from 30 million inhabitants. In Tahiti, 14% of the population died during only two months. Similarly, in Samoa in November 1918, 20% of the population of 38,000 died within two months. In the U.S., about 28% of the population suffered, and 500,000 to 675,000 died. Native American tribes were particularly hard hit. In the Four Corners area alone, 3,293 deaths were registered among Native Americans. Entire villages perished in Alaska. In Canada 50,000 died. In Brazil 300,000 died, including president Rodrigues Alves. In Britain, as many as 250,000 died; in France, more than 400,000. In West Africa, an influenza epidemic killed at least 100,000 people in Ghana. Tafari Makonnen (the future Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia) was one of the first Ethiopians who contracted influenza but survived, although many of his subjects did not; estimates for the fatalities in the capital city, Addis Ababa, range from 5,000 to 10,000, or higher. In British Somaliland one official estimated that 7% of the native population died.

Severe and acute, indeed.

And what of quarantines? Even then, it was hard to make them effective, because the world was “modern” enough that travel was common, especially with the war. But:

…in Japan, 257,363 deaths were attributed to influenza by July 1919, giving an estimated 0.425% mortality rate, much lower than nearly all other Asian countries for which data are available. The Japanese government severely restricted maritime travel to and from the home islands when the pandemic struck.

In the Pacific, American Samoa and the French colony of New Caledonia also succeeded in preventing even a single death from influenza through effective quarantines.

No man may be an island—but some countries are, and it can help.

[ADDENDUM: I’ve long heard that historians consider WWI the beginning of modern times (see this), but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there’s disagreement on that. Wiki seems to agree, however:

Our most recent era””Modern Times””begins with the end of these revolutions in the 19th century, and includes the World Wars era (encompassing World War I and World War II) and the emergence of socialist countries that led to the Cold War.

More recent events seem to be considered the contemporary era.]