Re: Parents claim religion to avoid vaccines for kids

1918 was the year of the great flu epidemic.

http://virus.stanford.edu/uda/

The influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 killed more people than the Great
War, known today as World War I (WWI), at somewhere between 20 and 40
million people. It has been cited as the most devastating epidemic in
recorded world history. More people died of influenza in a single year
than in four-years of the Black Death Bubonic Plague from 1347 to
1351. Known as "Spanish Flu" or "La Grippe" the influenza of 1918-1919
was a global disaster.

The effect of the influenza epidemic was so severe that the average
life span in the US was depressed by 10 years. The influenza virus had
a profound virulence, with a mortality rate at 2.5% compared to the
previous influenza epidemics, which were less than 0.1%. The death
rate for 15 to 34-year-olds of influenza and pneumonia were 20 times
higher in 1918 than in previous years (Taubenberger). People were
struck with illness on the street and died rapid deaths. One anectode
shared of 1918 was of four women playing bridge together late into the
night. Overnight, three of the women died from influenza (Hoagg).
Others told stories of people on their way to work suddenly developing
the flu and dying within hours (Henig). One physician writes that
patients with seemingly ordinary influenza would rapidly "develop the
most viscous type of pneumonia that has ever been seen" and later when
cyanosis appeared in the patients, "it is simply a struggle for air
until they suffocate," (Grist, 1979). Another physician recalls that
the influenza patients "died struggling to clear their airways of a
blood-tinged froth that sometimes gushed from their nose and
mouth," (Starr, 1976). The physicians of the time were helpless
against this powerful agent of influenza. In 1918 children would skip
rope to the rhyme (Crawford):

I had a little bird,
Its name was Enza.
I opened the window,
And in-flu-enza.

The influenza pandemic circled the globe. Most of humanity felt the
effects of this strain of the influenza virus. It spread following the
path of its human carriers, along trade routes and shipping lines.
Outbreaks swept through North America, Europe, Asia, Africa, Brazil
and the South Pacific (Taubenberger). In India the mortality rate was
extremely high at around 50 deaths from influenza per 1,000 people
(Brown). The Great War, with its mass movements of men in armies and
aboard ships, probably aided in its rapid diffusion and attack. The
origins of the deadly flu disease were unknown but widely speculated
upon. Some of the allies thought of the epidemic as a biological
warfare tool of the Germans. Many thought it was a result of the
trench warfare, the use of mustard gases and the generated "smoke and
fumes" of the war. A national campaign began using the ready rhetoric
of war to fight the new enemy of microscopic proportions. A study
attempted to reason why the disease had been so devastating in certain
localized regions, looking at the climate, the weather and the racial
composition of cities. They found humidity to be linked with more
severe epidemics as it "fosters the dissemination of the
bacteria," (Committee on Atmosphere and Man, 1923). Meanwhile the new
sciences of the infectious agents and immunology were racing to come
up with a vaccine or therapy to stop the epidemics.

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