Julie

“To try to prevent some of these problems, in 2015 the World Health Organization issued guidelines stipulating that disease names should not make reference to specific places, people, animals or food.”
― Laura Spinney, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World

“Whereas a benign, seasonal virus produced a transient cytokine response and localised, superficial damage to the lung, the 1918 variety produced a strong, prolonged cytokine response and damage that was severe and deep.”
― Laura Spinney, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World

“Cordon sanitaire. Isolation. Quarantine. These are age-old concepts that human beings have been putting into practice since long before they understood the nature of the agents of contagion, long before they even considered epidemics to be acts of God. In fact, we may have had strategies for distancing ourselves from sources of infection since before we were strictly human.”
― Laura Spinney, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World

“Assuming that you had a place you could call home, the optimal strategy was to stay there (but not immure yourself), not answer the door (especially to doctors), jealously guard your hoard of food and water, and ignore all pleas for help. Not only would this improve your own chances of staying alive, but if everyone did it, the density of susceptible individuals would soon fall below the threshold required to sustain the epidemic, and it would extinguish itself.”
― Laura Spinney, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World