YSM Issue 86.1

EPIDEMIOLOGY
FEATURE
3. The Greater War: The Flu of 1918
Courtesy of the U.S. Naval Center.
4. The Malady of the Americas: Yellow
Fever
As Europeans continued to colonize North
America, epidemics from Africa took even
deeper root in new, damp environments. Yellow
fever, caused by a variant of the Flavivirus family
and spread by the Aedes Aegypti mosquito,
entered through the African slave trade. Victims
developed muscle aches leading to liver failure
with jaundice and bled profusely from the eyes
and mouth.
Napoleon attempted to wrest control of
French colonies from rebelling slaves — until
over 80 percent of his troops sent to certain
North American territories perished to the fever,
allowing Toussaint L’Ouverture to liberate Haiti
and persuade Napoleon to sell the Louisiana territory.
Although controlled by removing stagnant
mosquito breeding water and a mandated vaccine,
yellow fever paved the road for regimes in
the New World.
Courtesy of www2.cedarcrest.edu.
1918 saw the end of grueling World War I.
As civilians rejoiced, a new, biologically deadly
war began to brew. As soldiers returned home,
an H1N1 avian influenza virus entered fresh
populations, spreading through bodily fluids.
Bizarrely targeting healthy young adults, the
virus caused fever, nausea, and hemorrhagic
diarrhea, followed by dark lesions upon the
skin. The dark lesions eventually turned blue
due to lack of oxygen as the lungs filled with a
bloody froth.
European businesses suffered heavy losses
following the wartime struggle. By the time
the virus evolved into less virulent strains, the
flu had took more casualties than all of World
War I , with an estimated global death toll of
50 million.
Courtesy of GAVI Alliance.
5. The Waterborne Killer: Cholera
Cholera had already plagued India’s contaminated
sewage and water systems for millennia
before cramped European cities of the Industrial
Revolution allowed the disease to move. Spread
through flies in contact with contaminated
water, Vibrio cholera caused severe vomiting
and diarrhea, which led to extreme dehydration.
Oftentimes, given continued exposure, entire
populations succumbed.
Better sanitation curbed the disease until 1961,
when a new Indonesian strain (the Ogawa strain)
spread rapidly through Bangladesh, India, the
USSR, Iran, and Iraq. The same strain would
later shatter Haiti after the 2010 earthquake,
with 530,000 cases stemming from the crippled
water infrastructure following the cataclysm.
Although later controlled through chlorination
of water, cholera limited metropolitan growth
for centuries.
January 2013 | Yale Scientific Magazine 33