By Parag Ranjan Dutta
On September 1, 1939, Hitler attacked Poland. There was more than one reason that prompted him to do so. Anti-semitism definitely played a major role. Hitler did not invent the hatred of Jews. Jews remained the victims of discrimination since the middle ages. In the 14th century Jews were blamed for plague epidemic in Europe and even accused of poisoning the wells. Hitler too possibly believed in that.
The noted Swedish filmmaker Inger Bergman’s 1957 epic movie, The Seventh Seal, was based on a historical fantasy. The movie is set in Sweden during the Black Death, about the journey of a medieval knight who played the game of chess the whole night with death (Grim Reaper) who comes to collect his soul.
Many of the world’s epidemics have been traced back to China that led the entire world to point their fingers to that country. Peter Navarro, Assistant to Donald Trump and Director of Trade and Manufacturing Policy went to the extent of describing China as ‘disease incubator.’
All these narratives describe one epidemic disease or the other. Here is my humble quest to find the chronological history of pandemic diseases.
Black Death, also known as plague is the most fatal pandemic recorded in human history that wiped out 70-200 million in Europe and Africa. It is believed to have originated in Central or East Asia and travelled along the silk route to Crimean Peninsula located on the northern of the Black Sea. Black Death, also known as Bubonic Plague is caused by bacteria that circulates among wild rodents living in great numbers in a region, called a ‘plague focus’ or ‘plague reservoir’. Transmission occurred via flees that feed on infected wild rodents. It is believed that flees living on black rats most likely carried the virus from Crimea when they travelled to Europe on merchant ships spreading the virus all along the countries of Europe and Africa bordering the Mediterranean Sea.
The plague reached Constantinople (present day Istanbul), Sicily and the Italian peninsula and in October 1347 reached mainland Europe when 12 ships from Black Sea anchored at the Sicilian port of Messina. To their utter surprise the local residents found that almost all the sailors aboard were dead and those still alive were very ill, their bodies covered with black boils oozing out blood. Immediately the authorities ordered the death ships out of the harbour, but it spread like wild fires that killed about 25 million people in Europe, about 30 percent of its population. Even before the merchant ships arrived at the port of Messina Europeans already heard of rumours of a Great Pestilence travelling along a deadly path from the east.
The phrase ‘black death’- describing death as black is very old. Even the great Greek poet Homer used the word in his epic poem Odyssey. The medieval people called it ‘blue sickness’or La Pest. The term bubonic comes from the medieval Latin- bubo via Italian Bilbo- meaning pustule, growth or swelling. Though originally thought to have originated in Asia recent studies have revealed that the pathogen responsible for Black Death may have existed in Europe as early as 3000 B.C. By the end of 1348 all the low countries of Europe namely Germany, France, England and Italy came within the folds of plague. By the middle of 1348 the French cities of Paris, Bordeaux, and Lyon came under the grip of plague. Eastern Europe felt in 1350.
Without any knowledge of biology Europeans believed that Black Death was a wrath of the God for their sins. Many even blamed the Jews for their different bloodline and religious belief and they were solely responsible for this catastrophe. Thousands of Jews were massacred and burnt alive; and many thousands fled to safer East Europe. The famous Italian poet Giovanni Boccaccio wrote on the plague- in Decameron (a collection of hundred tales by Boccaccio) “at the beginning of the malady, certain swellings, either on the groin or under the armpits waxed to the bigness of a common apple, others to the size of an egg, some more some less and these the vulgar named the plague boils”.
Though the World War I ended on 11th November 1918 people continued to die in the spring due to the most severe pandemic of the last century, known as Spanish influenza that swept through both Europe and America. It continued for three years that infected about 500 million, about one third of the world’s population. About 40 million people died of this virus infection.
The deadly pandemic stretched from the US and Europe to remote islands of the Pacific and Greenland. It was believed that the flu was caused by a deadly virus that originated in birds, which are nature’s primeval hosts of pandemic flu. During the war, Spain remained neutral and the deadly virus very likely reached Spain as a result of heavy movement of Spanish and Portuguese migrant workers to and from France. Initially a strange form of disease appeared in Madrid and since the beginning the epidemic has been called Spanish flu (or the ‘Spanish Lady’).
Evidences indicated that it was unlikely to have originated and spread from Spain. Some indicated that the influenza epidemic started in British Army camps. Spain remained neutral during the war and as there was freedom of press the Spanish newspapers published influenza related deaths. But the press in the allied countries hid information regarding casualties of their civilian and military population. It was dubbed as Spanish flu because it was thought at that time to have originated in Spain. It is definite that Spanish flu did not originate in Spain and scientists are still unsure about its source but China, France, and Britain have been suggested as potential sources of the virus.
The case of Spanish flu was first reported not in Spain but at a military base in Kansas, US, on March 11, 1918, when the cook Albert Gitchell, the first recorded victim fell ill due to flu. This facility at Fort Riley was meant for training American army during the World War.
In that morning of 1918, Gitchell was getting ready for breakfast but instead had to report to the hospital complaining of sore throat, fever and headache. By noon about 100 more from the army developed similar symptoms. It did not end with the initial outbreak. These were recurrence of such outbreaks in different parts of America. A recent study of 2005 suggested that it actually started in New York. The killer disease eventually killed 675,000 Americans and an estimated number of 20-50 million people around the world. During the catastrophe a nursery rhyme became very popular in the United States and children used to chant:
I had a little bird/And its name was Enza/I opened the window/And in-flew Enza
Alfred Crosby in his book – America’s Forgotten Pandemic; The Influenza of 1918 published in 1990 tells the chilling story of world’s deadliest flu pandemic.
The killer disease soon travelled to Europe when American soldiers headed to Europe to join the war and help the Allies on the battlefields of France. After the war ended on November 1918 when the American President Woodrow Wilson reached Paris to officially end the war and sign the Treaty of Versailles even he contracted the disease while negotiating the treaty.
According to the noted Australian flu virologist Kennedy Shortridge, the Chair Professor of Microbiology at the University of Hong Kong the Spanish flu of 1918 might have begun as bird flu in Canton in 1888.It was generally believed that the source of this deadly flu was China. According to him all flu pandemics that can be traced have always begun in Guandong, a very densely populated Province of China, where people, pigs, fowls, and ducks live together. He believed that the Chinese workers who travelled to France to dig tranches for the Allied Forces might have carried the virus strain.
It is definite that Spanish flu did not originate in Spain scientists are still unsure about its source but China, France and Britain have been suggested as the potential sources of the virus. The irony of history is that it has a different story to tell the whole world today.
Chinese workers contribution to WWI helped shape Europe- said an expert on Chinese history. According to Frances Wood the great war could have been lost due to a great shortage of manpower from the Allies, especially France and Britain, if the vast army of Chinese workers did not enter Europe. A total number of 140,000 Chinese workers served on the western front during the war time. Most of them served in the British Chinese Labour Corps and the rest with the French.
So it was neither the Chinese nor Spain was responsible for this pandemic disease. But the name remains. The influenza pandemic of 1918-20 will always be known as Spanish flu.
(The author is former head of the Department of Geography, St Edmund’s College)