Читать книгу Studies on Epidemic Influenza: Comprising Clinical and Laboratory Investigations онлайн

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The presence of influenza in San Quentin prison, California, in April, 1918 (Public Health Reports, May 9, 1919); an epidemic of respiratory disease in Chicago in the spring of 1918; the report of Soper of influenza in our army camps in March and April, 1918; the occurrence of influenza in Porto Rico in June; influenza on a United States Army transport from San Francisco, as reported by Coutant, seem to point to the possibility that influenza had a footing in America long before the disease became pandemic. The view held by some that the beginning of influenza was in America, subsequently being transferred to Europe and then reimported here, is worthy of consideration. Coutant believed the disease originated in Manila, others that it traveled from “a permanent endemic focus in Turkestan,” and there are many other theories which attempt to discover the original source of the disease. The question is today an unsettled one. The pandemic of influenza in its severest form swept so suddenly over the world that before the profession realized it or had become stabilized it had changed its character and the great plague was gone. The consequence has been that we have really learned little that is new and have done scarcely more than establish on a firm basis many of the opinions formed after the great outbreak of some 30 years ago. Because transportation is today more rapid than it was at that time, so the spread of the disease has been correspondingly swift. Our modern life, the congregating crowds in theatres, moving-picture houses and in lecture halls, as well as of the men in our training camps, the development of street cars and the more frequent traveling by train—these and many more changes in our mode of living have served to aggravate the conditions favoring the widespread distribution of the infecting agent. A higher proportion of the population was, therefore, attacked than in any previous pandemic, and the period during which the disease was widely prevalent has for the same reason been relatively much shorter.