Real Climate Records

Digest

MlCROBE hunters have practically conquered Spanish ‘flu, which in 1918 killed one out of every 100 people in the whole world.

In 1918 the ‘flu started on a world- wide rampage that, in one year, killed 20,000,000 people— half again as many as were killed in the four years of the war.

Then it practically disappeared.

But the wisest of scientists cannot tell whether the next world-wide sweep of old devil ‘flu will come in ten or 20 years, or this winter.

Only in the past few months have British and American ‘flu trappers felt sure, 99 and nine-tenths per cent, sure, that they have spotted this more deadly of microbe murderers.

Two years ago our ignorance about epidemic influenza was colossal. One fact was agreed

upon: that epidemic ‘flu itself was not a deadly sickness; it only opened adoor for death to get in to you.

This mysterious disease , apparently arose from nowhere to travel every where in a couple of months. In the gold mines in South Africa, among the Eskimos, in London, New York, all

over the world, every kind of human, from a Chinese coolie to an international banker, got the sudden fever.

Millions were sick for a week and got better; other millions thought they were getting better, and then — there were not enough hearses.

* *

WHEN the ‘flu raced through Iowa in 1918, the Government horse doctor, J. S. Koen, watched hogs develop a hacking cough; they got feverish and were so knocked out they wouldn’t move even when you kicked them.

Koen said it was influenza; that the pigs must have caught it from humans —and that brought a snout of laughter from doctors, even from microbe) hunters.

Meanwhile all laboratory attempts to give the ‘flu to every sort of animal had come to nothing. Till one day in 1933 Laidlaw, the brilliant Englishman who’d conquered the dog distemper, dripped drops of the garglings from the throats of London ‘flu folks into the nostrils of ferrets. At last, after years of failure, success! The ferrets developed a sniffling, sneezing feverish weakness that could be nothing else but human epidemic influenza.

But was this the ‘flu of the great man-murdering pandemic of 1918?

That plague had burned itself out in 1919, leaving absolutely no trace for any ‘flu-trapper to study. But now the pigs of Iowa c,me to the rescue of humanity. The hog ‘flu, noticed by Pig

Doctor Koen, had flared up winter after winter, until, ten years after, its midget microbe was detected.

Dripping ‘the virus of this hog ‘flu into the noses of ferrets and mice, Laidla.W proved that human ‘flu virus and hog ‘flu virus were blood brothers. So there’s every reason to believe that

the hog ‘flu midget was, in 1918, the mass murderer of men.

With all this knowledge our ‘flu trappers can now say that the chances are enormously in favor of a vaccines or a serum being found to guard us from Spanish ‘flu.

They know that when you shoot the live hog ‘flu virus into the muscles of pigs, instead of dropping it into their noses, those pigs don’t sicken, but instantly become immune to the swine influenza.

There is reason to hope that what holds for hogs will be true, too, for human beings.

By Paul de Kruif,.