Sorry about the poor math skills there. Couldn’t remember how old she was when she caught the flu and said about 10. Then realized since she was born in 1910 and it is after all called the 1918 flu for good reason---------
Well DUH----she had to be 8 years old when she caught it, almost died, but did survive—and lived a very healthy and long life.
Not to want to sidetrack this thread, and maybe it is deserving of a thread of its own but-----------
A few things occur to me about the flu epidemic (or pandemic I guess)—
Is that it killed so many very healthy young people at the time—who died too early to procreate. Something like 30 million young, healthy people died.
That, combined with the fact WW1 was also a seriously killer of the best of us. The young, the very healthy. WW1 was a bloodbath. An inexcusable waste of this world’s youth of the time. Again --remember --these were the best of the best young men of 1918. Mowed down like lambs to slaughter by modern machine gun technology and the absurdity of stationary trench warfare.
I forget how many young strong men died in ridiculous fashion and for absurd reasons in WW1------but it was in the millions.
So -----combine the two–
30 million healthy young people die from the 1918 flu epidemic --most never able to procreate. PLUS–many more millions of healthy young males died in battle also for the most of them before they could procreate.
So what do we got here??
Sounds to me like a SERIOUS depletion in the human gene pool (at least for Western civilization)— Which might have led to serious effects in the rest of the 20th century and even in the 21st centuy. ===TODAY.
Are we as naturally as healthy today as those before 1918? Did we lose something way back then?
Of course technically we are healthier than we were back then. But I think that is because of marvelous advances in medicine and treatment.
Not because we are naturally healthier.
I think we are much sicker as a species. Cancer ballooning. Diabetis out of control for parts of the population that never suffered from it. Psoriasis-----HIV, ADD -------Gawd --more things than I can count we suffer from today which were unheard of before 1918.
So you all--------do I have a legitimate point here? Did we lose the best part of our gene pool in 1918? Are we suffering from its affects even today?
(again Mods-------if this is deserving of its own thread------Please make it so.
Well…you may possibly have some family factors that would give you some level of natural resistance (though we’d need a lot more evidence than “my parents survived” to say for sure), like, say, a polymorphism in some protein the flu virus binds to or something. So in that sense, it’s not impossible.
But usually when you hear “immunity”, you’re talking about having antibodies to that virus floating around your system, ready to attack the virus if it shows up again. That definitely does not pass from generation to generation.
Now, someone’s going to come in and say, “well, what about mother’s milk, which includes important antibodies to protect the child?” To which I’d point out that that’s a purely temporary protection that wears off as the child grows. Antibodies get transferred, not fully functional differentiated B cells.
ombre3, one thing you should consider is that the 1918 epidemic and World Wars I and II were mere blips in the total human population at the time. Take this graph for example.
