carried in the upper respiratory tract, a phenomenon we referred to as “copathogenesis.” The mechanism(s) by which such potentiation may have occurred are unknown. We speculated that the 1918 virus may have had increased tropism for or have been unusually cytopathic for tracheobronchial cells, facilitating access of bacteria to the peripheral bronchopulmonary tree and leading to massive diffuse...

THE 1918 INFLUENZA epidemic was a major demographic event in the United States and worldwide. It is notable for its virulence (over 20 million deaths worldwide, approximately half a million in the United States); its maleness (a difference between male and female age-standardized death rates of 174 per 100,000 ); and its W-shaped mortality age profile (death rates having a mode in the 25–34-yea...

SUMMARY "The Great Influenza" recounts what humanity witnessed and experienced during the 1918 influenza pandemic. Author John M. Barry also describes the remarkable transformation of U.S. medical education just prior to 1918. That transformation not only helped America cope with the pandemic but also continues to influence medical research and practice today.

This text proposes to overcome the wide-spread error of dismissing Marx’s critique all materialism before him as being reductionist and therefore philosophically scientifically unacceptable. Instead, it attempts create a non-reductionist understanding practice in philosophy — especially by referring key contributions Althusser Bhaskar criticizing ‘materialist illusion’ early Marx thereby articu...

The 1918 influenza pandemic was a major epidemiological event of the twentieth century resulting in at least twenty million deaths worldwide; however, despite its historical, epidemiological, and biological relevance, it remains poorly understood. Here we examine the relationship between annual pneumonia and influenza death rates in the pre-pandemic (1910-17) and pandemic (1918-20) periods and ...

BACKGROUND The 1918-1919 A/H1N1 influenza pandemic killed approximately 50 million people worldwide. Historical records suggest that an early pandemic wave struck Europe during the summer of 1918. METHODS We obtained surveillance data that were compiled weekly, during 1910-1919, in Copenhagen, Denmark; the records included medically treated influenza-like illnesses (ILIs), hospitalizations, a...

The source, timing, and geographical origin of the 1918-1920 pandemic influenza A virus have remained tenaciously obscure for nearly a century, as have the reasons for its unusual severity among young adults. Here, we reconstruct the origins of the pandemic virus and the classic swine influenza and (postpandemic) seasonal H1N1 lineages using a host-specific molecular clock approach that is demo...

Recent studies have shown that most of deaths in the 1918 influenza pandemic were caused by secondary bacterial infections, primarily pneumococcal pneumonia. Given the availability of antibiotics and pneumococcal vaccination, how will contemporary populations fare when they are next confronted with pandemic influenza due to a virus with the transmissibility and virulence of that of 1918? To add...

BACKGROUND The impact of socio-demographic factors and baseline health on the mortality burden of seasonal and pandemic influenza remains debated. Here we analyzed the spatial-temporal mortality patterns of the 1918 influenza pandemic in Spain, one of the countries of Europe that experienced the highest mortality burden. METHODS We analyzed monthly death rates from respiratory diseases and al...

To determine the difference in age-specific immunoprotection during waves of influenza epidemics, we analyzed excess monthly death data for the 1918-1920 influenza pandemic in Taiwan. For persons 10-19 years of age, percentage of excess deaths was lowest in 1918 and significantly higher in 1920, perhaps indicating lack of immunoprotection from the first wave.