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0 pointsMunky-Necan6y ago0 comments

Chernobyl was projected to kill millions. The top epidemiologists in the world projected in the most realistic scenarios that the death toll would have been in the millions prior to the quarantines. Both could have been prevented if people knew the truth well in advance of the crisis.

Call it hyperbole, but the Spanish Flu killed millions because the public was not told the truth soon enough. We were likewise told this was nothing to worry about for months, and now we have ~30%-50% of the US quarantined.

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sfkdjf9j3j6y ago

Don't you think it's more likely that the Spanish flu was so widespread because of the unhygienic conditions and stressed infrastructure caused by World War 1?

Munky-NecanOP6y ago

Not at all. Good sanitation is going to prevent mainly oral-fecal spread of disease, but H1N1 (Swine flu is the most recent H1N1 pandemic) is droplet/airborne spread. Hand washing and physical distancing are key here.

If you're asking about hand washing practices in that era and if that would have prevented the spread, absolutely. Hand washing attenuated SARS spread during the 2002 epidemic by roughly ~50% [1]. I am not an expert in history so I cannot speak to hand hygeine practices during that era. What current research is suggesting is that H1N1 spread was exacerbated by a lack of knowledge to the public [2]. Time and time again public health is predicated on the right knowledge given as quickly as possible; this is the most important key to almost every single disease spread[3].

1)https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3323085/

2)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu#Spread

3) https://link.springer.com/article/10.1006/bulm.2002.0317

masonic6y ago

  because the public was not told the truth soon enough

Nobody knew the truth (as the "Spanish" moniker makes obvious). Germ theory itself was new, and viruses were unknown. In fact, a substantial effort to make a vaccine to combat the suspect bacteria resulted in actual deployment to thousands despite the fact that they had misidentified a bacterium as the culprit.

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