04-15-2020, 11:18 AM
** 15-Apr-2020 World View: 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic may have originated in China
A web site reader has called my attention to an article appearing in
National Geographic in 2014. The article points to a detailed
historical analysis with evidence that the 1918-19 Spanish Flu
pandemic actually originated in China:
A New York Times article by Rick Gladstone on February 10, 2020, lists
several pandemics that have been traced to China:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/10/world...virus.html
So the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic would be in addition to those five.
A web site reader has called my attention to an article appearing in
National Geographic in 2014. The article points to a detailed
historical analysis with evidence that the 1918-19 Spanish Flu
pandemic actually originated in China:
Quote:> "1918 Flu Pandemic That Killed 50 Million
> Originated in China, Historians Say
> For decades, scientists have debated where in the world the
> pandemic started, variously pinpointing its origins in France,
> China, the American Midwest, and beyond. Without a clear location,
> scientists have lacked a complete picture of the conditions that
> bred the disease and factors that might lead to similar outbreaks
> in the future.
> The deadly "Spanish flu" claimed more lives than World War I,
> which ended the same year the pandemic struck. Now, new research
> is placing the flu's emergence in a forgotten episode of World War
> I: the shipment of Chinese laborers across Canada in sealed train
> cars.
> Historian Mark Humphries of Canada's Memorial University of
> Newfoundland says that newly unearthed records confirm that one of
> the side stories of the war—the mobilization of 96,000 Chinese
> laborers to work behind the British and French lines on World War
> I's Western Front—may have been the source of the pandemic. ...
> "This is about as close to a smoking gun as a historian is going
> to get," says historian James Higgins, who lectures at Lehigh
> University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and who has researched the
> 1918 spread of the pandemic in the United States. "These records
> answer a lot of questions about the pandemic."
> https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/...ce-health/
A New York Times article by Rick Gladstone on February 10, 2020, lists
several pandemics that have been traced to China:
- Asian flu of 1957
- Hong Kong flu of 1968
- 1997 Bird Flu outbreak
- 2003 Sars epidemic
- Covid-19
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/10/world...virus.html
So the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic would be in addition to those five.
