With plenty of dry, hacking coughs, and sniffles, seasonal influenza has reached epidemic proportions in Mississippi.
Local schools so far have been spared, but the flu should be more worrisome for Mississippians than Ebola and almost any other disease known or unknown. We’ve seen it’s deadly effects before, and history tells us we’ll see it again.
Few but Warren County’s oldest residents were alive during the country’s worst flu epidemic, and even our eldest today were just children when the Spanish Flu — often called the Spanish Lady even though the virus is believed to have originated in Kansas — wrought havoc upon Warren County.
As the Spanish Lady did her terrible dance across the globe in 1918, dozens of Warren County residents died of the disease. At least 36 people died of the Spanish Flu here in 1918. The number seems small but it represents almost 4 percent of all deaths in Warren County for 1918.
At least 1,300 people had been infected with the virus.
The 36 deaths could have been much worse if it weren’t for sharp public health officials. Under the advice of county health officer Dr. G.Y. Hicks, Warren County was virtually shutdown in October 1918 as the infection rate worsened.
“I want to go on record as advocating the closing of every public gathering place now and at once as a precautionary measure. Not only because of the number of cases here now, for there are only a few, which developed in the last few days, but because of the number of cases that we are certainly going to have unless some action is taken,” Hicks wrote in the Oct. 7, 1918, edition of the Vicksburg Evening Post.
All stores were ordered to close at 6 a.m. Hotels and pool halls had their floors scrubbed, and every spittoon in the city flooded with disinfectant. High school buildings were fumigated, and Hicks encouraged students to wear surgical style masks.
So why should a flu pandemic nearly 100 years ago make us worry today?
“[T]here seemed to be something of a pattern of more or less one major pandemic in every century. Well, influenza is a viral infection transmitted person to person; an airborne disease, much more contagious than say SARS, that we remember from just a few years ago. SARS requires prolonged face-to-face contact, but not influenza,” said Dr. Frank Snowden, a Yale professor who is an expert on the history of medicine.
Sounds like it’s time to get a flu shot — now and for the next hundred years.
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Josh Edwards is a reporter and can be reached by email at josh.edwards@vicksburgpost.com or by phone at 601-636-4545.