Insights into Spanish Flu Pandemic and Climate

Angela

Elite member
Messages
21,823
Reaction score
12,327
Points
113
Ethnic group
Italian
See:
https://www.archaeology.org/news/9086-201007-climate-war-pandemic

[COLOR=#202020 !important][COLOR=black !important][FONT=arial-black_b !important]Ice Core Offers Insight Into 20th-Century Spanish Flu Pandemic[/COLOR][/FONT][/COLOR]
[COLOR=#202020 !important]CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS—According to a statement released by Harvard University, Alexander More of Long Island University and the University of Maine and his colleagues compared climate data collected from an ice core from a central European glacier with early twentieth-century historical records, and found that a six-year period of “miserable weather” preceded and overlapped with major battles of World War I and peaks in the numbers of deaths from the Spanish flu. “Basically, we saw a spike in cold, wet marine air from the northwest Atlantic that came down into Europe and lingered,” More said. Trench warfare in the cold, torrential rains and the resulting mud likely contributed to the run-down condition of soldiers’ health, in addition to malnutrition brought on by crop failures. The weather may have also disrupted the migratory patterns of disease-carrying waterfowl, More explained. The outbreak of the Spanish flu in the spring of 1918 is thought to have been connected to troop movements, infecting more than 500 million people and killing between 30 and 50 million.[/COLOR]
 
Somebody better not start any wars then :).
 
Last edited:
I think it's a pattern that we could probably find repeatedly throughout history, where war, failed crops and diseases coincide. If you have large masses of people living together and they aren't well nourished, their immunity to disease is lower. If those masses are soldiers moving around a large area they spread the disease. Even birds seem to spread disease when there's a big enough reservoir of the disease.

The first bubonic plague outbreak, according to a perhaps apocryphal story, occurred because the Mongol Horde besiegers of the Genovese outpost of Kaffa in the Crimea, sickening with a disease they probably brought from the steppe, threw their dead bodies over the wall into the Genovese fortress. It was also a period of unusually wet, cold weather with the consequent decline in crop productivity.
 

This thread has been viewed 6907 times.

Back
Top