Flu Quotes

“Today, such studies are illegal. Medical scientists cannot offer inducements like pardons to persuade prisoners to take part in their studies. Although they can award small cash payments to research subjects, they are forbidden from giving anyone so much money or such tempting favors that their compensations might constitute what ethicists term an inappropriate inducement, an irresistible temptation to join the study.

Now, more than eighty years after the 1918 flu, people enter studies for several reasons—to get free medical care, to get an experimental drug that, they hope, might cure them of a disease like cancer or AIDS, or to help further scientific knowledge. In theory at least, study participants are supposed to be true volunteers, taking part in research of their own free will.

But in 1918, such ethical arguments were rarely considered. Instead, the justification for a risky study with human beings was that it was better to subject a few to a great danger in order to save the many. Prisoners were thought to be the ideal study subjects. They could offer up their bodies for science and, if they survived, their pardons could be justified because they gave something back to society.

The Navy inmates were perfect for another reason. Thirty-nine of them had never had influenza, as far as anyone knew. So they might be uniquely susceptible to the disease. If the doctors wanted to deliberately transmit the 1918 flu, what better subjects? Was influenza really so easily transmitted? the doctors asked. Why did some people get it and others not? Why did it kill the young and healthy? Could the wartime disruptions and movements of troops explain the spread of the flu? If it was as contagious as it seemed, how was it being spread? What kind of microorganism was causing the illness?

The normal way to try to answer such questions would be to study the spread of the disease in animals. Give the disease to a few cages of laboratory rats, or perhaps to some white rabbits. Isolate whatever was causing the illness. Show how it spread and test ways to protect animals—and people—against the disease.

But influenza, it seemed, was a uniquely human disease. No animal was known to be susceptible to it. Medical researchers felt they had no choice but to study influenza in people. Either the Navy doctors were uncommonly persuasive or the enticement of a pardon was overwhelmingly compelling. For whatever reason, the sixty-two men agreed to be subjects in the medical experiment.

And so the study began. First the sailors were transferred to a quarantine station on Gallops Island in Boston Harbor. Then the Navy doctors did their best to give the men the flu. Influenza is a respiratory disease—it is spread from person to person, presumably carried on droplets of mucus sprayed in the air when sick people cough or sneeze, or carried on their hands and spread when the sick touch the healthy. Whatever was causing the flu should be present in mucus taken from the ill.

The experiments, then, were straightforward. The Navy doctors collected mucus from men who were desperately ill with the flu, gathering thick viscous secretions from their noses and throats. They sprayed mucus from flu patients into the noses and throats of some men, and dropped it into other men’s eyes. In one attempt, they swabbed mucus from the back of the nose of a man with the flu and then directly swabbed that mucus into the back of a volunteer’s nose.”
― Gina Kolata, Flu: The Story Of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It

“The 1918 epidemic came in two waves, a mild flu in the spring of 1918 followed by the killer flu in the fall.”
― Gina Kolata, Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It

“But as the program got going, the smallest details became issues, even the very name of the disease. Pig farmers complained to the Centers for Disease Control that the name “swine flu” might frighten people away from eating pork. They asked, to no avail, that the flu’s name be changed to “New Jersey”
― Gina Kolata, Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It

“By the dawn of the twentieth century, for the first time since cities had come into existence 5,000 years before, infectious diseases were staunched to such an extent that cities were able to remain stable, and even grow, without depending on a constant stream of migrants from the countryside. It was a remarkable change.”
― Gina Kolata, Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It

“[T]he only epidemic disease that plagued the troops during the early years of World War I was syphilis.”
― Gina Kolata, Flu: The Story Of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It

“The victory over cholera was only a beginning. With the growing and profound knowledge that many diseases are caused by microscopic organisms and that the spread of disease can be prevented, the Western world was transformed.

It took years for the change to be complete, but the result was a vigorous public health movement that emphasized simple but powerful measures like cleaning up water supplies and teaching people what now seem to be basic lessons of health and hygiene—keep flies away from food, wash your hands before handling food, give your babies milk, not beer, quarantine the sick.

The results were dramatic. In large areas of the world, many of the killer diseases seemed tamed, or even vanquished, and deadly epidemics seemed to be relics of the past.”
― Gina Kolata, Flu: The Story Of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It

“Giovanni Boccaccio wrote in his Decameron that people, afraid of contamination by the rotting corpses, would drag the dead outside their houses and leave them in front of their doors to be picked up, like so much garbage.”
― Gina Kolata, Flu: The Story Of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It

“Medical historians believe the sickness began in China in 1331. Along with a civil war, it halved the Chinese population. From there, the plague moved along trade routes of Asia and arrived in the Crimea fifteen years later, in 1346.

Then it entered Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. It disrupted society in ways eerily reminiscent of the Athens plague so long before. It emptied streets and public places like the flu epidemic that followed it. And its very name became emblematic of the horrors of epidemics. It was known as the Black Death.

At the time the illness was as mysterious as the plague of Athens but now it is known that the Black Death bacteria, Yersinia pestis, were spread by fleas that lived on black rats. The rats, in turn, moved from port to port on ships, taking the illness with them. The fleas would bite people, infecting them with the bacteria.

The plague would not have been so overwhelming if it could only spread through flea bites. It turned out that once the bacteria began infecting people, they found another way of spreading. They would infect the lungs and cause a pneumonia, whereupon sick people could infect the healthy simply by coughing or sneezing.”
― Gina Kolata, Flu: The Story Of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It

“But in the rest of the world, the illness came to be called the Spanish flu, to Spain’s consternation. After all, the other countries of Europe, as well as the United States and countries in Asia, were hit too in that spring of 1918. Maybe the name stuck because Spain, still unaligned, did not censor its news reports, unlike other European countries. And so Spain’s flu was no secret, unlike the flu elsewhere.”
― Gina Kolata, Flu: The Story Of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It

“How lethal was it? It was twenty-five times more deadly than ordinary influenzas. This flu killed 2.5 percent of its victims. Normally, just one-tenth of 1 percent of people who get the flu die. And since a fifth of the world’s population got the flu that year, including 28 percent of Americans, the number of deaths was stunning.”
― Gina Kolata, Flu: The Story Of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It

“Pig farmers complained to the Centers for Disease Control that the name “swine flu” might frighten people away from eating pork. They asked, to no avail, that the flu’s name be changed to “New Jersey flu.”
― Gina Kolata, Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It

“knows exactly how serious this threat could be. Nevertheless, we cannot afford to take a chance with the health of our nation.” With that preamble, Ford announced that he was asking Congress to appropriate $135 million “for the production of sufficient vaccine to inoculate every man, woman, and child in the United States,” for a disease that no one could even prove to exist.”
― Gina Kolata, Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It

“Perhaps, in some innocent encounter in China between a child and a bird, a new killer flu is on its way. Or perhaps, even now, a young man or a young woman has become infected with two different strains of flu viruses. They are mixing together in the person’s lungs, their genes reassorting. Emerging from that witches’ brew is a new virus, a chimera, that, like the 1918 flu virus, is perfectly suited for destruction. Perhaps, as we grow almost smug about influenza, that most quotidian of infections, a new plague is now gathering deadly force. Except this time we stand armed with a better understanding of the past to better survive the next pandemic.”
― Gina Kolata, Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It

“air cannot flow out of the room, only in. There they are bathed in blue ultraviolet light, which kills viruses. After that, they tug on”
― Gina Kolata, Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It

“city did take a few precautions. On September 18, its health officials began a public campaign against coughing, spitting, and sneezing. Three days later, the city”
― Gina Kolata, Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It

“Perhaps, in some innocent encounter in China between a child and a bird, a new killer flu is on its way. Or perhaps, even now, a young man or a young woman has become infected with two different strains of flu viruses. They are mixing together in the person’s lungs, their genes reassorting. Emerging from that witches’ brew is a new virus, a chimera, that, like the 1918 flu virus, is perfectly suited for destruction.”
― Gina Kolata, Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It

“The 1918 epidemic came in two waves, a mild flu in the spring of 1918 followed by the killer flu in the fall. And it seemed that the two flu strains were closely related. Infection with the first strain protected against the second”
― Gina Kolata, Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It

“The results were unequivocal. Both in London and in the United States, people who had survived the 1918 flu had antibodies that completely blocked Shope’s swine flu virus. People who were born after 1918 did not have those antibodies.”
― Gina Kolata, Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It

“But the flu was expunged from newspapers, magazines, textbooks, and society’s collective memory. Crosby calls the 1918 flu “America’s forgotten pandemic,” noting:”
― Gina Kolata, Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It

“Then the influenza epidemic arrived. Unlike the plague of Athens, unlike the Black Death, unlike even the cholera epidemic that felled William Sproat and the other cholera epidemics to come in that century, the flu epidemic had no chronicler.”
― Gina Kolata, Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It

“The cholera epidemic was a turning point marking the last time the disease would rage without simple precautions of public health.”
― Gina Kolata, Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It

“He estimates the number of deaths worldwide as 100 million, a larger number than the conventional estimate of 20 to 40 million. But, he said, 20 million people died in India alone, making it impossible for the 20 to 40 million figure to be correct.”
― Gina Kolata, Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It

“Instead, the dean had said, “Take a look at the person sitting to your left and to your right. Chances are that person will not be there four years from now.” Every”
― Gina Kolata, Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It