catherine-siena-dr-of-the-church:
I’ve been here longer than you and I’ve never seen a ghost here
I had to read that 4 times before my brain actually got it.
Vice: Shelter in Place with Shane Smith & Edward Snowden
“People in power who see that there is a political advantage to disguising, or concealing, or massaging, or denying numbers, may choose to lie about it.
It’s happened before and it’s almost certainly happening now.
We see the Chinese government recently working to expel Western journalists at precisely this moment where we need credible independent reporting from this kind of region.”
Pathologists were able to trace the origins of the Spanish Influenza to Haskell County, Kansas which was a rural farming community. The winter of 1917 - 1918 was particularly brutal in that area with cold temperatures and lots of snow. Because of the weather conditions, farmers in the region began moving their livestock inside to protect them from the elements. It’s around this time that a novel H1N1 influenza virus jumped from a bird (probably a chicken) into a pig, and then into a human. It then began to spread around the local community.
The influenza outbreak in Haskell County, KS was so severe that January, that the local doctor sent a telegram to Washington D.C. indicating the severity of the flu epidemic. That telegram was only a footnote in history and was ignored as the U.S. prepared to enter into WWI. Upon entering the war, we began recruiting troops from all over the country. Some of those troops came from Haskell County, KS and those troops were stationed in barracks at Fort Riley, KS. It was here that the Spring Wave of the Spanish Influenza began. Within a week, Fort Riley had hundreds of cases of influenza and the milder wave of the disease was moving along with the troops.
When the troops went to Europe to fight, people who had a milder form of the influenza continued to fight in the trenches and didn’t infect many people, while people with a more severe form of the disease were transported to troop hospitals where they had the chance to infect far more people. In this way, the wartime conditions rewarded the virus for making us sicker and killing more people. Over time, the virus mutated into a relentless killer.
The Spanish Flu did, in fact, get its name because Spain was a neutral country in the war and was reporting accurate information. From the general consensus at the time, it seemed like the flu was striking Spain particularly hard, with some speculating that the virus had originated from Spain. That’s why it was named the Spanish Flu. When pathologists and historians were able to track the true origins of the virus decades later, the name had already stuck.
I had this scheduled because it’s May 18th but it has an entirely new meaning this year
