Salem Lorot > Recent Status Updates

"In a conversation several months before his death, my father abruptly told me, “I’ve been praying the Rosary every morning on my way into the office.” He said it in his brusque, matter-of-fact, even challenging manner. I was stunned—not that he would pray the Rosary but that he would speak about his prayer life at all."

"I thought it would take me two and a half years to write, three at the most. That plan didn't work. Instead this book took seven years to write."

"So even with all the medical advances since 1918, the CDC estimates that if a new pandemic virus strikes, then the U.S. death toll will most likely fall between 89,000 and 300,000. It also estimates a best case scenario of 75,000 deaths and a worst case scenario in which 422,000 Americans would die."

"Every expert on influenza agrees that the ability of the influenza virus to reassort genes means that another pandemic not only can happen. It almost certainly will happen."

"Nothing in science is as damning as the inability of an outside experimenter to reproduce results."

"It seems to me a crying pity that men who have given years to the necessary preparation for a lab career should be so ruthlessly drawn away from it and made to fill executive positions."

"They grew huge amounts of virulent Type III pneumococci, and spent not just hours or days but months and years breaking the bacteria down, looking at each constituent part, trying to understand. The work was of the utmost tedium, and it was work that yielded failure after failure after failure."

"So, lacking other candidates, many scientists remained convinced Pfeiffer's did cause the disease, including most of those at the Rockefeller Institute."

"The greatest questions remained the simplest ones: What caused influenza? What was the pathogen? Was Pfeiffer right when he identified a cause and named it Bacillus influenzae? And if he was not right, then what did cause it? What was the killer?"

"The virus was still not finished. All through the spring of 1919 a kind of rolling thunder moved above the earth, intermittent, unleashing sometimes a sudden localized storm, sometimes even a lightning bolt, and sometimes passing over with only a rumble of threatened violence in the distant and dark sky. It remained violent to do one more thing."

"By late November, with few exceptions the virus had made its way around the world. The second wave was over, and the world was exhausted. And man was about to become the hunter."

"In the Indian subcontinent alone, it is likely that close to twenty million died, and quite possibly the death toll exceeded that number."

"A very few-very few-isolated locations around the world, where it was possible to impose a rigid quarantine and where authorities did so ruthlessly, escaped the disease entirely. American Samoa was one such place. There not a single person died of influenza."

"Nothing today can cure influenza, although vaccines can provide significant- but nowhere near complete- protection, and several antiviral drugs can mitigate its severity."

"Some say the world will end in fire," wrote Robert Frost in 1920. "Ice is also great/and would suffice."

"In the whole the face of things, as I say, was much altered; sorrow and sadness sat upon every face; and though some parts were not yet overwhelmed, yet all looked deeply concerned; and as we saw it apparently coming on, so every one looked on himself and his family as in the utmost danger."

"Sometimes they collected the bodies in trucks. "So many people died they were instructed to ask for wooden boxes and put the corpse on the front porches," recalled Harriet Ferrell. "An open truck came through the neighbourhood and picked up the bodies. There was no place to put them, there was not room."

Philadelphia staggered under the influenza attack, isolated and alone. In Philadelphia no sign surfaced of any national Red Cross and Public Health Service effort to help. No doctors recruited by the Public Health Service were sent there. No nurses recruited by the Red Cross were sent there. Those institutions gave no help here.

And he often said, "Disappointment is my daily bread. I thrive on it."

"Knowledge of influenza's epidemiology, then, was of little use. Only ruthless isolation and quarantine could affect its course."

"The immune system changes with age. Young adults have the strongest immune system in the population, most capable of mounting a massive immune response. Normally that makes them the healthiest element of the population. Under certain conditions, however, that very strength becomes a weakness.

"In 1918 The immune systems of young adults mounted massive responses to the virus...The immune response killed."

"This was influenza, only influenza. Yet to a layperson at home, to a wife caring for a husband, to a father caring for a child, to a brother caring for a sister, symptoms unlike anything they had seen terrified...The symptoms chilled laypeople, chilled them with winds of fear."

"It was a common practice in 1918 for people to hang a piece of crepe on the door to mark a death in the house. There was crepe everywhere."

"And he was by nature someone who thought most problems disappeared on their own."

"The disease soon became known as "Spanish influenza" or "Spanish flu," very likely because only Spanish newspapers were publishing accounts of the spread of the disease that were picked up in other countries."

"By 1918 humankind was fully modern, and fully scientific, but too busy fighting itself to aggress against nature. Nature, however, chooses its own moments. It chose this moment to aggress against man, and it did not do so prodding languidly. For the first time, modern humanity, a humanity practicing the modern scientific method, would confront nature in its fullest rage."