(If you read this book and think he is a good author, you can read his other book "Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America". It was extremely interesting. Up to 1927, blacks were solidly Republican. After the debacle of the Republican's handling of that flood, they switched to the Democrat party.)
Well, I figure if you have hung in there after reading the past several posts, you are probably willing to read more. Here are more quotes from the book "The Great Influenza".
How have countries recently tried to stop new influenza pandemics?
p. 114 Influenza pandemics generally infect from 15-40 percent of a population....To prevent the 1997 Hong Kong virus (H5N1)...from adapting to people, 1.2 million chickens in Hong Kong were slaughtered.
p. 114. in 2003..when a new H7N7 virus appeared in Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany, 30 million poultry and swine were slaughtered....to stop either of these influenza viruses from adapting to, and killing, man.
What are the common symptoms of normal influenza?
p. 232 common symptoms then as now: The mucosal membranes in the nose, pharynx, and throat become inflamed. The conjunctiva becomes inflamed. Victims suffer headaches, body aches, fever, often complete exhaustion, cough....Disease was ushered in by two groups of symptoms: in the first place the constitutional reactions of an acute febrile disease--headache, general aching, chills, fever, malaise, prostration, anorexia, nausea or vomiting; and in the second place, symptoms referable to an intense congestion of the mucous membranes of the nose, pharynx, trachea, and upper respiratory tract in general, and of the conjunctiva.
In the most deadly wave of influenza in the 1918-1919 pandemic, what were the symptoms?
p. 232-237, 240-241 Then there were the cases in which the virus struck with violence....Pain, agonizing pain in joints, subcutaneous emphysema (pockets of air accumulating just beneath the skin--from air leaking through ruptured lungs.) Extreme earaches, ear drums bursting. Renal failure. Cyanosis- people turned so black doctors couldn't tell white people from black people. Blood spurting from nose, mouth, ears, or around the eyes. In U.S. Army cantonments, from 5% to 15 % of all men hospitalized suffered from bleeding from the nose. There were many reports that blood sometimes spurted from the nose with enough power to travel several feet. Damage to brain, heart, kidneys. Muscles along the rib cage were torn apart both by internal toxic processes and by the external stress of coughing. Lungs ripped apart in a way suggestive of a particularly virulent form of bubonic plague called pneumonic plague
p. 242 Perfectly healthy people one minute, dying the next.
p. 247 Within fifteen minutes after influenza viruses invade the body, their hemagglutinin spikes began binding with the sialic-acid receptors on the (epithelial cells, which line the entire respiratory tract..all the way to the alveoli in the lungs)....Generally about ten hours after the virus invades a cell, the cell bursts open, releasing between 1,000 and 10,000 viruses capable of infecting other cells. ...1000 times 1000 times 1000 and so on---one can easily understand how a victim could feel perfectly healthy one moment and collapse the next...
Philadelphia and New York were affected by the worst wave of the pandemic. What happened there?
p. 328 Very likely half a million- possibly more--Philadelphians fell sick. On a single day of October 10, 1918, the epidemic alone in Philadelphia killed 759 people. Prior to the outbreak, deaths from ALL causes combined averaged 485 a week.
p. 332 During the week of Oct. 16, 1918 alone, 4,597 Phildelphians died from influenza or pneumonia, and influenza killed still more indirectly. That would be the worst week of the epidemic.
p. 333 In New York City at Presbyterian Hospital, each morning on rounds Dr. Dana Atchley was astounded, and frightened, to see that, for what seemed to him an eternity, every single patient--every one--in the critical section had died overnight.
p. 337 The mortality rate at Cook County hospital for all influenza cases--not just those who developed pneumonia--was 39.8%.
How successful are scientists today at making a vaccine?
p. 451-452 To make a vaccine, investigators have to aim at a moving target. Every year they try to predict which virus strains will dominate and the direction of the antigen shift. Then they design a vaccine...the real danger, though, is that it may not be possible to develop and distribute a vaccine in time to protect against a new virus. ...in 1997, developing this virus took more than a year.
How likely is it that we will have another influenza pandemic?
p. 449-450 Every expert on influenza agrees that the ability of the influenza virus to reassort genes means that another pandemic not only can happen, it almost certainly will happen...Influenza is among the most contagious of all diseases. The influenza virus can spread from person to person before any symptoms develop, before a victim knows he or she is sick.
If a new influenza virus does emerge, with modern travel it will likely spread even more rapidly than it did in 1918. In the US alone, the Centers for Disease Control estimates that a new pandemic would make between 40 and 100 million people sick.
p. 452 one could easily imagine a lethal virus--even one less virulent than that of 1918--killing tens of millions worldwide. No disease, including AIDS, poses the long term threat of a violent explosion that influenza does.
And on that pleasant note, I will end my book review of "The Great Influenza". Have a nice day!!
P.S. Also, I forgot to write this before. When I ordered the N95 masks, I asked the employee at Zefon International if there had been an increase in the number of masks being sold lately. She said yes, there definitely had been an increase but she didn't know why. I told her that I assumed its because people are starting to try to prepare for the pandemic.
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