To the general population, science seems like a field that consists of facts and certainty. However, this could not be further from the truth. The life’s work of a scientist can be taken away in an instant. In a passage from “The Great Influenza,” John M. Barry expresses that the success of a scientist depends on their capacity to handle challenges. Using ethos, extended metaphor, and rhetorical questions, Barry characterizes science as a path of uncertainty.…
The Nipah Virus causes severe illness. A person with this infection will get a respiratory disease, a term that includes extreme conditions affecting the organs and tissues that make gaseous exchange possible in organisms, and includes conditions of the upper respiratory tract, trachea, bronchi, alveoli, pleura and the nerves and muscles of breathing. (Source c)…
A virus is a small infectious agent that replicates only inside the living cells of other organisms. A virus is a small parasite that cannot reproduce by itself. Once it infects a susceptible cell, however, a virus can direct the cell to produce many more viruses. Viruses can infect all types of life forms, such as animals and plants to microorganisms, including bacteria and archaea.…
Another reason that the flu had such a severe impact on the U.S. military is because of the way that the military was structured and arranged during World War I. In her article, “The U.S. military and the Influenza Pandemic of 1918-1919”, Carol Byerly gives information about the organization of the military into camps. Byerly uses the example of Camp Devens in Massachusetts to show how seriously the epidemic affected military camps. According to Byerly, the flu spread over the course of only ten days to infect more than 15% of the soldiers stationed there. This was similar to Fort Shelby, where almost every new recruit became sick. Researchers such as Victor C. Vaughan, the Dean of the University of Michigan School of Medicine, and Rufus Cole,…
The beginning of this pandemic (In the Spring 1918) was fairly mild, the people who did get sick experienced the normal symptoms, and recovered after a few days. But in the fall of the same year a second and extremely contagious wave of this virus appeared. After showing symptoms, patients would die between hours and days. Due to this the average life expectancy in America was reduced by 12 years. The deaths that this pandemic caused have been estimated at 20 - 50 million. But the most unusual aspect of this strain of influenza was that it infected so many young men and women; people who were normally not affected by the…
In the early years of 1918 through 1920, influenza stormed around the world in the worst pandemic in recorded history, killing at least fifty million people, and more than half a million of them were Americans. Yet, despite the devastation, many groups of people within the United States handed this epidemic very differently from each other. There were differences between “men as well as women, whites as well as people of color, middle and upper classes, as well as the working class…”(Bristow p.9). After all the commotion of this monstrosity, and how it was feared, Americans had also neglected the pandemic and soon erased all events from their memory and history.…
Most influenza outbreaks disproportionately kill juvenile, elderly, or already weakened patients; in contrast the 1918 pandemic predominantly killed previously healthy young adults. Modern research, using virus taken from the bodies of frozen victims, has concluded that the virus kills through a cytokine storm . The strong immune reactions of young adults ravaged the body, whereas the weaker immune systems of children and middle-aged adults resulted in fewer deaths among those groups.…
Lastly influenza killed 40 million people worldwide. The symptoms of influenza are sore throats, headaches, loss of appetite and blood poisoning. A large percentage of people died from this disease, once infected. It takes 3 days for the person to die. Influenza was transmitted by air. It was very bad…
Many people think that flu shots are not important each year but what they don’t know is that the number of deaths each year from influenza keep rising. You may think that…
New diseases and pandemics shock government and individuals, and are many times difficult to treat. This remained true in the past, whether it be the Black Death or the Influenza pandemic of 1918, and true today, as examined by governments and society trying to adjust to the new threats of Ebola and Zika. The 1918 influenza pandemic and the current response to Zika can be compared by examining how similar they are in terms of showing how government quarantines can be counter productive and how government actions taken during the flu hurt the Ebola response in the modern world.…
American Lung Association. (2014, Jan 1). Indoor Air Quality. Retrieved Feb 18, 2014, from www.lung.org:…
Influenza affects an estimated 5-15% of the world 's population and results in 500,000 deaths annually (World Health Organization, [WHO], 2009b). In the United States (US), between 1979 and 2001, an average of 226,000 persons was hospitalized and 36,000 died each year as a result of complications from influenza (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], 2007). The primary and most effective method of symptom reduction and prevention of influenza is vaccination (Sullivan, 2010). Influenza vaccination…
The influenza caused about a fifth of the earth’s population to get infected from the disease. Today, society recognizes this awful disease as the Spanish Influenza of 1918; however, it is also referred to as the ‘Forgotten Flu’ because of the neglect that it receives from American society.…
Researcher have indicated that the uptake rates of annual influenza uptake is effected by several factors, such as locational setting of vaccination availability (Lu 2014), the cost of administering vaccine (Wada 2013) and the perceived vulnerability for the age groups (Wu 2013). Many of these factors also can be perceived as barriers that impact the vaccine uptake rates. Although these barriers here contribute to low annual uptake of influenza vaccine in adults, public health officials can minimize the impact of barriers to increase the levels of vaccine uptake in several ways. Majority of adults receive influenza vaccines in a medical setting (38.4%), but a large remaining portion of adults receive vaccines in non-medical settings because…
Hib (Haemophilus influenzae type b) is a bacterial infection that can cause a number of serious illnesses such as pneumonia or meningitis, especially in young children. Hib infections are preventable by vaccination.…
