Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
dia. This oversight is analogous to the history of the First World War having been written with a vivid,
sustained focus on the campaigns in the Balkans and Gallipoli while devoting only an occasional aside or
footnote to the slaughter on the Western Front.
Table 2.1.
Pandemic Mortality 1918-19—Revised 37
Worldwide
(a) 21.64 million
(b) Asia48.8 to 100 million
Asia
15.78
26 to 36
India
12.50
18.5
China
. . . . . .
4 to 9.5
East Indies
.80
1.5
Europe
2.16
2.3
Africa
1.35
2.38
W. Hem.
1.40
1.54
USA
.55
.68
(a) Jordan (1927) (b) Johnson & Mueller (2002)
The enormity of influenza's impact on India has never been questioned. For decades the authoritative
guide to worldwide pandemic mortality was the 1927 American Medical Association-sponsored
study— Epidemic Influenza —by Edwin Oakes Jordan, editor of the prestigious Journal of Infectious
Disease, who had spent years poring over death statistics. The huge spike in mortality during the fall of
1918—U.S. life expectancy fell by ten years—allowed him to make estimates of the pandemic toll des-
pite the absence of influenza data per se (see Table 2.1 ). Jordan believed that global mortality from influ-
enza was in the range of 20 to 22 million (about 1 percent of the human race), with India alone suffering
12.5 million deaths, almost 60 percent of the total. (U.S. flu deaths, by contrast, constituted only 3 per-
cent of the world total.) But at an international conference on the history of the great pandemic, held at
University of Cape Town in September 2001, medical demographers Niall Johnson and Juergen Mueller
challenged Jordan's estimates “as almost ludicrously low.” Reviewing modern research, they came to the
conclusion that “global mortality from the influenza pandemic appears to have been of the order of 50
million.” Moreover, the two warned that “even this vast figure may be substantially lower than the real
toll, perhaps, as much as 100 percent understated.” In other words, it is possible that mortality was actu-
ally closer to 100 million or more than 5 percent of the contemporary world population. In their revision,
Indian deaths (mainly in the deadly second wave of influenza after September 1918) are reckoned at 18.5
million, although another scholar thinks 20 million is more likely. 38
What explains the extraordinary mortality in India? “Famine and pandemic,” observes I. Mills,
“formed a set of mutually exacerbating catastrophes.” Indeed, these two factors were exquisitely syn-
chronized during the fall of 1918. As Mills explains in one of the few scholarly articles on the Indian
experience, the milder first wave of the pandemic arrived in Bombay in June (via the crew of a troop
transport) just as the southwestern monsoon was failing throughout much of western and central India;
the resulting drought led to soaring grain prices and famine conditions in Bombay, the Deccan, Gujarat,
Berar, and, especially, the Central and United Provinces. (Although not mentioned by Mills, grain exports
 
Search WWH ::




Custom Search