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  • September 1918:

  • Camp Devens, Massachusetts.

  • The man on the autopsy table has turned blue.

  • Dr. William H. Welch nods to proceed.

  • His colleagues reach for the bone saw

  • and begin to open the ribcage.

  • The man's lungs are heavy.

  • Welch and his colleagues lean in as they're opened.

  • The lungs are so full of fluid

  • that it's traveled up the trachea.

  • The man had drowned

  • in his own body,

  • just like the others.

  • Welch needs air.

  • He opens the door and stumbles around men lying on the floor.

  • There are no longer enough beds in the hospital.

  • Six thousand men, crammed at a facility meant for 1,200,

  • and they're turning blue.

  • This is a horror story;

  • one of the most frightening in history.

  • In 1918 a new disease emerged.

  • We still don't know exactly how or where it first began infecting humans,

  • but within months

  • it would spread across the planet,

  • from the trenches of the Western Front to the most remote villages on earth.

  • It infected 1/3 of the world's population and killed between 50 and 100 million people.

  • To put that in perspective,

  • the low estimate would make it twice as deadly as World War I,

  • while the high estimate would mean it killed more than both World Wars combined.

  • Between 3-6% of the global population

  • died within 18 months.

  • It was the first modern plague,

  • turning our interconnected world against us

  • by spreading through shipping lanes,

  • rail lines

  • and the arteries of industrialized war,

  • yet it was also the first pandemic of the scientific age,

  • where doctors could,

  • to some extent,

  • understand what was happening

  • and stand against the infection,

  • though they lacked the tools to stop it.

  • So in 1918,

  • while researchers couldn't really see viruses,

  • they knew such things must exist.

  • They had no idea that unlike the bacteria they could see in their microscopes,

  • the flu was not alive in any way humans understood it:

  • Just a bunch of unstable genetic material that possessed a cell, forcing it to pump out

  • billions of copies of itself,

  • and with each cell infected,

  • a minority of those new viruses mutated into something more infectious;

  • more deadly.

  • A microorganism that,

  • through the randomness of natural selection,

  • became progressively better at catching and killing as it passed through each host.

  • In its wake it altered a World War,

  • drove languages extinct,

  • and shattered the sense of invulnerability that modern medicine had begun to cultivate,

  • and when the nightmare ended,

  • the world did what any person does when they wake from a dream:

  • It forgot!

  • But forgetting is something we can't afford

  • because the virus that ravaged the world in 1918 is still out there;

  • still mutating,

  • and it will return.

  • Yet, despite its impacts,

  • we still don't know where the pandemic originated,

  • but there are theories!

  • Canada, 1917.

  • A train races across the plains.

  • Military guards are instructed to keep civilians away from the locomotive.

  • If they see what's inside,

  • there may be a riot.

  • These cars, designed for cattle,

  • contain the men of the Chinese Labor Corps.

  • Pawns in a political gambit,

  • until recently,

  • the young, fragile Republic of China had remained neutral in the first World War.

  • With so many foreign countries holding territory within its borders,

  • joining the conflict

  • risks making their homeland

  • a battleground.

  • But neutrality was not tenable.

  • Japan, one of the allies,

  • had used the war as pretext to move troops

  • into Chinese territory

  • and demand control of the Chinese government.

  • To thread the political needle, China had declared war on Germany.

  • Hopefully the other allies will now protect China

  • from Japanese aggression and give it a seat at the post-war negotiating table.

  • It may even get its occupied territory back.

  • But to maintain a shred of neutrality,

  • these Chinese recruits are barred from combat.

  • They would dig trenches,

  • lug ammunition, and clear minefields.

  • So here they are,

  • shipped to Canada,

  • crammed on train cars,

  • and traveling overland to a troop ship in Halifax.

  • But there's something else among them.

  • A respiratory disease that had ravaged northern China the previous year.

  • A winter sickness

  • severe enough that some victims coughed blood and turned blue.

  • First, one recruit begins to cough,

  • then another.

  • One by one they fall ill with splitting headaches and chills.

  • Crammed into the cattle cars, there's nowhere to run;

  • nowhere to isolate the sick.

  • They beg the guards to let them get off and seek medical attention,

  • but due to the rampant anti-Chinese sentiment in Canada,

  • the guards have their orders to keep the passengers a secret.

  • By the time they reach Halifax,

  • 3,000 have to be placed in quarantine.

  • Doctors give the sick nothing but castor oil for sore throats

  • and load the rest of the recruits onto the troop ships for France.

  • Those men aren't sick...

  • yet.

  • But flu victims are contagious days before presenting symptoms,

  • meaning the British Empire has just delivered Pandemic flu

  • to the trenches.

  • If that is,

  • it was flu,

  • because another emergence is about to occur in the unlikeliest of places.

  • March 4th, 1918.

  • Camp Funston, Kansas.

  • Like every military base in America,

  • Camp Funston is overcrowded.

  • The second largest training center in the country,

  • Funston's 56,000 men live in barracks and tents,

  • each waiting to be rotated to duty in the US or France.

  • Diseases always break out when recruits muster for war,

  • so it's no surprise when a private,

  • a Cook no less, reports for sick call with influenza.

  • By noon, 107 other soldiers have joined him.

  • Within three weeks it'll be over 1,100.

  • Alarming, sure, but this is wartime.

  • Camp outbreaks happen.

  • Even as 20% of the patients develop pneumonia and 38 died

  • Doctors see nothing abnormal,

  • but they're missing a key piece of the puzzle.

  • A month before and 300 miles away,

  • the lone doctor in Haskell County, Kansas had watched flu kill dozens of his strongest,

  • healthiest patients.

  • It's rapid pace and high fatality rate alarmed him so much,

  • that he contacted the Public Health Service

  • and published an alert in the National Health Journal,

  • but no one listened!

  • The paper's obituary page was unusually busy that February,

  • but alongside the reports of death and illness were heartwarming articles.

  • Soldiers from Haskell County were departing for boot camp

  • or visiting home one last time before deployment.

  • All headed to Camp Funston,

  • and from there, to France.

  • Two weeks after the first case at Funston,

  • 10% of recruits were reporting sick at two camps in Georgia.

  • By the end of the month,

  • 24 of the 36 largest military bases in America had cases,

  • along with 30 major cities.

  • No one noticed...

  • yet.

  • Army Medical Department,

  • Washington, DC.

  • Doctor William H. Welch was tracking an epidemic.

  • One of the country's most famous doctors, Welch had helped drag American medicine into the modern age.

  • He helped found the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine,

  • spread the use of microscopes,

  • and organized the Rockefeller Institute,

  • the country's first dedicated medical laboratory.

  • His work had helped transform America from a nation of country doctors

  • to a Titan of scientific medicine,

  • able to compete with the Pasteur Institute in France

  • and the Koch Institute in Berlin.

  • Because of him, America had joined the age of the microscope and the vaccine,

  • a bright world where doctors could both see diseases and kill them.

  • The last few decades had brought vaccines for smallpox, rabies, anthrax, diphtheria, and meningitis.

  • Researchers at the Rockefeller Institute were taking the first steps towards limb reattachment

  • and organ transplantation.

  • Some optimists even predicted a future without communicable disease!

  • And America needed that scientific power now more than ever!

  • Even before the war,

  • Welch delivered a message to the Army Surgeon General:

  • When mobilization happens,

  • you'll have an epidemic!

  • You'll need to recruit the best doctors and microbiologists.

  • You'll need researchers,

  • train cars outfitted as mobile research laboratories,

  • a stockpile of vaccines and antitoxins,

  • anything to be ready.

  • When the war started,

  • the Surgeon General didn't bother recruiting Welch and his researchers.

  • He just unfolded the Rockefeller Institute into the army.

  • And here it was, the epidemic that Welch had feared.

  • He could see it moving on the map from camp to camp,

  • and it had killed nearly 6,000 already.

  • He had sent researchers to chart the spread

  • and battle the secondary cases of pneumonia that were the real killer in most epidemics.

  • They'd all warned the army that this would happen if they overcrowded the camps,

  • but no one listened!

  • Welch had dispatched an experimental vaccine that fought one form of bacterial pneumonia,

  • as well as a serum that cut the death rates by half.

  • Results of the test looked good, if not 100% effective.

  • It was proving a successful response.

  • But there was a problem.

  • Because the epidemic that Welch was fighting to contain wasn't flu,

  • it was measles.

  • He'd seen reports of influenza spreading too, but

  • influenza was seasonal,

  • something that was expected and would go away.

  • Doctors weren't even obligated to report cases to the Public Health Service,

  • so the prospect of a measles outbreak seemed much more serious,

  • especially with recruits grouped together in training camps

  • and 36,000 of the nation's doctors deployed in France.

  • So as Welch fought Measles,

  • infected American troops boarded troop ships.

  • They packed into the hold until each converted ocean liner held twice the normal load of passengers.

  • They pulled away from the dock

  • waving farewell to families and loved ones on shore

  • and turned towards Europe.

  • It was in the bloodstream now.

  • Not just of the men,

  • but of the world...

September 1918:

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B2 中高級 美國腔

1918年流感大流行--出現--額外的歷史--#1 (The 1918 Flu Pandemic - Emergence - Extra History - #1)

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    uuu 發佈於 2021 年 01 月 14 日
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