In the third episode of the Health, Intl. podcast, Samhita and Thomas discuss the Spanish flu of 1917-1920, a global pandemic that could provide analogies for the current Covid 19 crisis. They discuss how the Spanish flu has been often forgotten in history, and how the flu compares and contrasts with today’s pandemic.
Listen now.
Episode notes
Featuring: Samhita Bharadwaj & Thomas Gidney
Music: What I Learned from Your Mother, by Elephant Funeral (CC By-NC-ND 4.0)
Picture: Men wearing masks during the Spanish Influenza epidemic / Hommes portant un masque durant l’épidémie de grippe espagnole, 1918. Library and Archives Canada, PA-025025, CC By 2.0.
Sources:
Spinney, Laura. Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World. 1 edition. New York: PublicAffairs, 2017.
Crosby, Alfred W. America’s Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918. Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Oxford, JS, A Sefton, R Jackson, W Innes, RS Daniels, and NPAS Johnson. “World War I May Have Allowed the Emergence of ‘Spanish’ Influenza.” The Lancet Infectious Diseases 2, no. 2 (February 1, 2002): 111–14.
Cheng, K. F., and P. C. Leung. “What Happened in China during the 1918 Influenza Pandemic?” International Journal of Infectious Diseases 11, no. 4 (July 1, 2007): 360–64. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijid.2006.07.009.
Langford, Christopher. “Did the 1918–19 Influenza Pandemic Originate in China?” Population and Development Review 31, no. 3 (2005): 473–505.
Oxford, John S., and Douglas Gill. “A Possible European Origin of the Spanish Influenza and the First Attempts to Reduce Mortality to Combat Superinfecting Bacteria: An Opinion from a Virologist and a Military Historian.” Human Vaccines & Immunotherapeutics 15, no. 9 (September 2, 2019): 2009–12.
