A Tale of Plagues: The Plague was not just a medieval illness | Hacker News Reader

A Tale of Plagues: The Plague was not just a medieval illness

historytoday.com

36 pointsVigier14 comments

A short but great book came out last year called Black Death at the Golden Gate that explores the epidemic(s) of plague in turn-of-the-century San Francisco, and how epidemiological efforts to study and fight it were hamstrung by local press and government officials viciously opposed to every measure the proto-CDC health service tried to impose. It ends on an ominous note, noting the likelihood that the bacterium persists in East Bay rodents and could strike again without warning.

https://www.amazon.com/Black-Death-Golden-Gate-America/dp/03...

Yersina pestis is endemic in rodent populations in the American Rocky Mountains. There are a few human cases every year, which are treatable with antibiotics if caught early enough.

...as long as the antibiotics still work. :(

I find it very curious that the Spanish Influenza epidemic is almost completely forgotten; you have to look very hard to find anything that references it, despite it killing far more people than WW1, and being almost within living memory.

From Wikipedia: "To maintain morale, wartime censors minimized early reports of illness and mortality in Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and the United States"

Maybe that's a reason for it

The wartime censorship was short-term and its only lasting impact was to give this particular influenza strain its name (Spain was neutral so did not have the same strict censorship, so they actually reported flu deaths and people heard about it first through these reports -- therefore the flu must have come from Spain they thought...)

We were taught about it in history class and it was mentioned in the news during the avaian influenza scare.

And at the recent 100-year anniversary of same, and in just about every article talking about the yearly flu. A quick glance shows me that I have three books about it on my kindle right now; it is ever-present. What you actually don’t hear much about is the 1968 flu pandemic, which was recent-enough to be relevant to any modern discussion of the topic and which killed millions.

Huh - I’ve heard tons about the 1918 flu but this is the first I ever heard of 1968.

> What you actually don’t hear much about is the 1968 flu pandemic, which was recent-enough to be relevant to any modern discussion of the topic and which killed millions.

The other piece I've seen discussing the 1918 flu was pointing out that there's something of a standard for using 100-year averaged mortality from disease, and in 2019 there would suddenly be a gigantic drop in that supposedly smooth statistic.

It seemed like it was relevant to modern discussion to me.

> A quick glance shows me that I have three books about it on my kindle right now; it is ever-present.

You are not a good sample. Discussion of the flu is almost nonexistent, but you are a person who has three books about it. You are not in a position to judge whether other people talk about it.

I am mystified as to why this comment was downvoted.

Personally: because I've been hearing it non-stop throughout my life, in very nearly every single thing I've read about flu or pandemics. So I find a comment that says "I don't understand why (this thing I have never stopped hearing about) is never talked about", without any additional context or commentary, very low-value.

That's interesting - maybe it's just that US history as commonly taught never reaches the 20th century.

In comparison, it seems like you can't touch on medieval history without getting into the Black Death, and medieval-tinged fantasy is rife with fictional analogues.

> I find it very curious that the Spanish Influenza epidemic is almost completely forgotten;

In the US, we are taught about the Spanish Flu in school. The news mentions the Spanish Flu every year during flu season. Every other epidemic movie mentions the Spanish Flu. There are even documentaries about it.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/influenza/

Without a doubt WW1 overshadows the Spanish Flu, but that doesn't mean it is anywhere close to being forgotten.

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