Normally, I don't reprint someone else's work in my blog. But today I make an exception. Mike Leavitt, Secretary of HHS, has over the past few months visited every state in the country to participate in pandemic summits. In his opening address, he gives a little history about how that state fared in the 1918 pandemic.
New York State Summit
Opening Remarks Prepared for Delivery By the Honorable Mike Leavitt Secretary of Health and Human Services
July 27, 2006
That Great Pandemic also touched New York.
The first sparks appeared during the last week of September 1918, when some 61 New Yorkers were diagnosed with the Spanish flu.
The pandemic soon became a raging fire. Less than two weeks after it first appeared, more than 2,500 New Yorkers were afflicted. Tens of thousands would follow them to the hospital. Thousands would follow to the morgue.
Nearly 4,000 New Yorkers perished from the pandemic during the first three weeks of October. At the same time, more than 4,500 more died in cities all across the state. In Rochester, 213 perished in one week.
Doctors fell alongside the patients they were caring for. One was Dr. George Gorrill, the superintendent of Buffalo State Hospital. There were far too few caregivers to begin with, for their thin red line had been stretched taut by the demands of World War I.
In an effort to fill those depleted caregivers, the junior and senior classes of the Buffalo Medical School were pressed into service. Shortly afterwards, the sophomore class joined them.
But there were still too few to care for all that had been afflicted. Acting Health Commissioner for the City, Franklin Gram said:
“It was no uncommon matter to find persons who had waited two or three days after having repeatedly phoned or summoned physicians, suffering and dying because every physician was worked beyond human endurance.”
All across the state, entire families were stricken with the disease at once.
In Albany, the Altman family, including nine-year-old Stella, her mother, and her three younger siblings, fell ill. Stella later remembered, “There was no help to be found anywhere; everyone was too busy caring for their own families.” Stella’s mother died, but the children could not attend her funeral, for they were too ill.
The Steins of New York City’s South Center Street were also afflicted. A charity worker who checked in on them found a baby dead in its crib and the remaining seven members of the family seriously ill.
In Brooklyn, a man named Michael Wind was six years old when the flu came to the city. He remembered:
When my mother died of Spanish influenza, we were all gathered in one room, all six of us, from age two to age twelve. My father was sitting beside my mother's bed, head in his hands, sobbing bitterly. All my mother's friends were there, with tears of shock in their eyes. They were shouting at my father, asking why he hadn't called them, hadn't told them she was sick. She had been fine yesterday. How could this have happened?
Unable to cope, Wind’s father left his children at the Brooklyn Hebrew Orphan Asylum. The Asylum was soon filled with 600 children, most of them orphaned by the flu.
The great pandemic filled not only the orphanages of New York City, but also its hospitals and morgues. More than 90,000 New Yorkers were eventually afflicted. More than 12,000 perished.
When it comes to pandemics, there is no rational basis to believe that the early years of the 21st century will be different than the past. If a pandemic strikes, it will come to New York.
I've reprinted his remarks for New York, but you can visit the follow url,
http://www.pandemicflu.gov/general/greatpandemic2.html
to read accounts of every state in the nation. It is sobering reading
