Secrets of the Dead: "Killer Flu"

Found this running on PBS tonight. The 1918-1919 flu pandemic has always fascinated me (as one is fascinated by snakes and people like Saddam Hussein). It seems appalling that this virulent disease was "the flu" that for most people, except the old, infirm, or very young, is just a nuisance that keeps you feeling miserable for a week or two. The cyanotic episodes ("heliotrope cyanosis" is the description, which gives you a good idea of the color blue the victims turned) are particularly frightening. The story is that a person could leave for work feeling a little under the weather, come home deathly ill at lunchtime, turn blue by afternoon, and be dead by night.

The last special about the "Spanish influenza" I saw traced the source to burning of horse manure at an American army base in Kansas. However, the base source for all flu germs seem to be birds, transmitted from domestic birds to humans, or from domestic birds to pigs to humans (which of course why modern scientists are paying so much attention to bird flu epidemics in China which are spreading). Also, soldiers in 1916 France were dying of a disease remarkably similar to what was later described as the Spanish influenza, but there is still yet no evidence linking the two outbreaks.

One of the reasons I like watching these type of specials is that I love the old newsreels and films showing how people dressed and the streets looked: women in filmy picture hats, little boys in Eton suits, country girls in shawls wrapped around their heads and bodies, ladies in hobble skirts and men in high collars, boys in cloth caps, horses pulling hearses, carriages, dray wagons, early automobiles and ambulances.

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 8:51:00 PM

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