Stuff You Should Know - How the Spanish Flu Worked

Episode Date: January 8, 2019

The Spanish Flu killed anywhere from 20-100 million or more people over 1918/1919. All of this played out with World War I in the foreground, one big reason why the flu spread so far, so fast. Learn all about this devastating pandemic in today's episode.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey friends, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lisa in Manitoba, who got the idea to Airbnb the Backyard Guest House over childhood home. Now the extra income helps pay her mortgage. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at Airbnb.ca slash host. On the podcast, HeyDude the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and

dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to HeyDude the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant right there. There's Jerry over there. And while you guys are feeling fine, I'm a little under the weather, but it's still Stuff You Should Know, the 2019 flu edition. That's right. And this is dangerously close to public state for us. Yeah, a little close for comfort if you ask me.

But you know what this gives us the opportunity to do? Real time stuff. Yeah, like say Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco. Yeah. We're going to be in your town next week. No, you're right, dude, next week when this comes out. Yeah, so more theater on January 15th in Seattle, Revolution Hall in Portland on January 16th, and then our annual sketch fest show at the Castro on January 17th.

That's right. Tickets are moving kind of slow, guys, and I think there's been people writing in saying, I didn't even know that you were coming. So I don't know what the problem is. We're coming. We're coming. We're still troubleshooting what the deal was because we don't ever want it to happen again, but I just feel good knowing that everybody's not mad at us out in the Pacific Northwest.

Well, I hope not. I would hope not too, but it was kind of like in that way for a second. We think it might be something to do with our promos. Who knows? So we wanted to put it in this episode, right? Like in the body of the episode. Like you can't miss it. You can't miss it. So go to sysklive.com and there will be links out to go get tickets, info, all that stuff.

We'll see you guys next week. So hurry, hurry, hurry. Go get your tickets. We'll see you next week. Yeah. Next Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Right. And I will be feeling better by then, I'm hoping.

Yeah, I hope so. So Chuck is kind of appropriate that we're talking about the flu because I don't have the flu, but I'm a little sick, a little funky. I'm not contagious, so don't worry. Well, I appreciate you wearing the face mask anyway. Which it turns out, according to this article that Ed wrote, it's yeah, useless. It doesn't do anything. Yeah. I don't know if that's truly useless, is it?

Yes. I think it is actually quite useless. Really? If it's a bacterial infection, it might do something because bacteria is much larger than viruses, but viruses are very, very small, certainly small enough to be expelled through the mash of a gauze when you cough or sneeze into it. So you sneeze and that mask puffs out in little particles, spew, maybe just not as far. Yeah.

Yeah, they might be slowed down a little bit. Who knows, maybe like being pushed through like a little channel speeds them up and increases their trajectory. Oh my God. We don't know yet. Yeah, but this is a flu-centric episode and I can't remember. I think I was turned on to this idea. You were turned on by this idea?

No, to this idea. Oh, I see. I think it was when I was sort of going down a World War I rabbit hole. Oh yeah, you were talking about that in some episode. I think that was what it was. So this is pretty appropriate that we're talking about this because exactly 100 years ago, today basically, the United States, the world really was standing there stricken, picking up the pieces of basically shattered societies all around the globe that had just been leveled,

absolutely leveled by a flu epidemic that came through and killed so many people, made so many people sick. It's widely seen as possibly tied for first, if not it's a very close second to the worst natural disaster and the worst pandemic to ever hit humankind in the history of our species. Yeah. That's how bad it was and it happened just 100 years ago. Yeah, I've seen estimates as high as 50 million people dead. Yeah, I've seen it up to 100 million.

I think 50 million is, it used to be like the low end or the high end and now it's starting to become clear it's probably about the low end. I think the low end is 20. Oh, is that right? And I'm going to name the high end 500 million people. That's supposedly from what I've seen how many were actually infected. Oh, well, possibly and not only that, like when that many people die, it changes the course of world history.

Yeah, it basically unravels the fabric of society as we'll see. Yeah, society and cultures and rules and just how humans looked at the earth, like it really turned the forward march of humanity in a certain direction. It definitely did. And like this, it's really difficult, like this is one of the most fascinating pieces of world history to me because it was like, it's pretty well documented because it happened only 100 years ago and because it's just so insane what happened. Like the Spanish flu was so bad, Chuck, that people were dying of thirst because there

was no one around them to take care of them. The people who were still healthy were so afraid of catching the flu, they would basically let their neighbors die alone in their homes rather than go help them and take care of them and give them water. Like that's how bad it was, like people were dying of thirst from being so laid up by the flu and not being able to get water themselves and not having anyone to take care of them. And it happened in the United States 100 years ago. And all over the world and despite all of this horrific thing we're about to talk about,

the Grabster started his article writing about hockey because he is from Buffalo. And then later on, it's the third wave that canceled the NHL playoffs. Yeah. I mean, it is a footnote though, the Stanley Cup, the very famous Stanley Cup, the trophy of the NHL that has all the winning teams etched into it says, series not completed. That's all it says. And unless you know what's going on, you might just scratch your head and say, why was the series not completed that year?

And the reason is because the Spanish flu literally killed one of the players and got quite a few of them sick on both sides of the Seattle Metropolitan's and the Montreal Canadians. Yeah. I guess like right before the fifth game was going to be played or the sixth game was going to be played, four of them were in the hospital, one died. And they were like, yeah, we'll just go ahead and cancel the series this year. Crazy.

But what is crazy is like that's pretty bad because think about it. You're a hockey player, you're probably young, you're probably pretty healthy. It's really weird to die from the flu. And that was a big hallmark of the Spanish flu as we'll see. But this was also like a third wave. This was the third like roundhouse that the Spanish flu had delivered to the global population when the Stanley Cup was canceled or the NHL playoffs was canceled that year in 1919. Amazing.

So let's talk a little bit about flues normally. Shall we? Yeah. I think everyone understands that a flu is not bacterial like you were talking about. It is a virus. And ordinarily like the flu that you have, is it the flu you have or cold? It's just like a cold, it's just funk, you know what I mean? You mean I went to Vegas for her birthday to go see Dave Chappelle and John Mayer.

And I think just being on the plane and being kind of run down and everything, we both kind of picked up a little bit of funk. I think it's that time of year. It's a funky kind of year. She only gets sick every January. Yeah. I think it also has to do with the holidays just because they're as fun and unadulteratedly enjoyable as they are.

They're also a tad stressful sometimes. Well, yeah. And that's her busy time of year for her business. Oh, yeah. That'll do it. It's almost inevitable that she'll get sick every January, just like her body's fighting and fighting all through December. And then just goes literally the day after Christmas, it's like sniff.

Yeah. You just crash. Here it comes. Yeah. So the flu is a virus and in most cases, like I was saying, you have your aches and your fever and your coughing and you're tired and sometimes it may affect your stomach some. Sometimes it may not, but it's usually in and out in a few days. And that's sort of the end of it.

If you're, like you mentioned, if you're elderly or if you're a little tiny one, the flu can be pretty dangerous in any case, but ordinarily in healthy adults, it's just a regular sickness that comes and goes. Yeah. Especially like if you look at, you know, a graph of ages starting at an infant all the way, say 200 year olds, if you look at flu deaths, it goes down in the middle and then goes back up. It's high on one end, high on the other end, very low to non-existent in the middle.

Like healthy, like middle-aged and younger adults don't die from the flu normally. Right. So there are many types of flu, many strains of this virus and in 1918 for the Spanish flu, which we'll get to the odd naming of that in a second, it was type A, subtype H1N1 because they have subtype designations and then within those subtypes, there are other strains because the flu is constantly trying to outrun humans and humans trying to beat it down. Yeah. I guess so.

So it's like, I'm just going to change a little. Yeah. Watch this and it goes, beep, boop, boop, boop. And now it's bumblebee from Transformers. Exactly. So this was a genuine pandemic called the Spanish flu and I never knew this at all, but it really had nothing to do with being out of Spain or have anything to do with Spain other than the fact that Spain was neutral in World War II, or I'm sorry, World War I, and while

other newspapers around the world were really censoring things and not so free, Spain was just reporting, the only country really reporting about the flu. Yeah, right. So they called it the Spanish flu. I didn't realize this either and the Spanish were like, no, no, wait, wait, you guys aren't getting this, it's all just disproportionately on us. It started in Kansas. Right.

It seems like Spain had the worst of it because like you said, they were the only ones who were openly reporting on it and some of the Axis and Allied, actually that might have been World War II, but some like France, Germany, Great Britain, the US, the governments were at war and their propaganda machines were in full swing. They didn't want to do anything to impact morale. They also didn't want to give the enemy any indication that their troops were sick, that there was a flu virus spreading through their ranks. So they just downplayed it at home and everywhere, but since Spain was neutral, they talked about

it and seemed like Spain had the worst of it. That's totally not the case. It's just, it was all just reporting. Spain just reported on it openly. That's fascinating to me. Yeah, totally fascinating and it was a legit pandemic because it touched kind of every corner of the globe except for notably two places that were able to successfully quarantine themselves.

What was that? American Samoa? Yeah. New Caledonia. Are those even places? They still are places thanks to those quarantines. Yeah. It could have wiped them out.

Oh yeah. I think some places did get wiped. I believe Western Samoa was basically wiped out by the Spanish flu. There were plenty of like settlements, especially Native American settlements in more remote places like Alaska that were almost entirely, if not entirely wiped out and then depending on where you went around the world, like Japan got hit, but they had like a 1% infection rate or something like that where other places had like, I think globally it was about 30%. So it was strange how it hit people differently, but it was definitely, like you said, it was

a real pandemic in that it was everywhere around the world that this strain of the flu was leveling people. Yeah. And there's a couple of other kind of startling stats. That 500 million infected that you were talking about, not dead, but infected, that was about a 33% of the world's population, which is startling. And in the United States, life expects, you know how it talked about it just changing everything?

Oh yeah. Life expectancy in the US by 12 years. Yeah. From 1918 to 1919, the expected average expected or the life expectancy, like you said, it went from, it went to 36.6 for men and 42.2 for women. Man. Which is pretty like the, what it had been before was still pretty low, but to drop by 48.

12 years overnight basically, because I don't think we've gotten this across yet, Chuck. What we're talking about happened in less than a year, in less than a year, a third of the world's population came down with this very, very lit flu. And as much as 5% of the world's population died from that flu in less than a year. Yeah. And we'll talk about the different waves, but the second deadliest wave really was about four months. And the amount of people that died within a four month period all over the world is

just like, it's hard to really grasp. It really is. And the other thing about it too is, largely because of that propaganda machine that was, the propaganda machines that were in full operation in all those different countries, along with kind of exuberance for the war being over, or just basically being focused on the war. Because the Spanish flu happened at the same time, World War I was going on and ending. It wasn't, it's not remembered like you think it would be.

Like you would think this would be, like everyone would know about this and be talking about it. And it's not. It just kind of got swept under the rug historically speaking in a lot of ways. Yeah. You want to take a break? Yeah. I think that was a wonderful, long-winded setup.

That's what we do. That's how we do things. Hey friends, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lisa in Manitoba, who got the idea to Airbnb the backyard guest house over childhood home, now the extra income helps pay her mortgage. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too.

Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca slash host. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever.

Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing.

Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, Chuck. So let's start at what may be the beginning. There's this guy named John M. Berry, and he is a—not Embery, by the way. His middle initial is M, and his last name is Berry.

He is an historian, and he wrote a book called The Great Influenza, and he wrote an article based on his research called How the Horrific 1918 Flu Spread Across America, it's on Smithsonian Magazine. And this guy's done some legwork, and he has created a theory that's starting in about January of 1918, the beginning of 1918. There was a flu outbreak in Haskell County, Kansas, which is a very rural agricultural area, and that some of those farm boys who came down with the same flu made their way to Camp Funston, which is part of Fort Riley, Kansas now.

Yeah. Santa Fe, in particular, is the town, if you want to even pinpoint it further. In Kansas, not New Mexico. Yeah. Santa Fe, Haskell County, Kansas. 300 miles west of Camp Funston. Yep. So some of these farm boys who were sick with this flu ended up being drafted and sent to

Camp Funston, and it was Camp Funston where they think the first cases of the Spanish flu started to break out. That first wave happened in about the spring, and then traveling over to Europe into the summer of 1918. And it wasn't that first wave wasn't particularly bad, it wasn't even particularly noteworthy, and it was mostly confined to do boys, basically, people who worked on military bases as well, and then maybe towns near military bases. But that was about it.

And then it went away and it wasn't like, had it just been that, it probably would not have been remarkable historically at all. Yeah. And we may not even know about any of this as far as its origin, and there have been a lot of other theories over the years about its origin, but this one seems to hold the most water now, but we may not have ever known anything about any of the origin if it had not been for Dr. Loring Minor, who was a great, for as small of a county in town as this was, he was a really great town doctor.

And he was, like at the time, flu just would come and go, like I said, so it was never reported on in journals, it was never really a big deal, it was never published. But Dr. Loring Minor was so alarmed at the rate of spread in his small town and how much of a wallop that it packed, he actually published his concerns in a journal called the Public Health Reports Journal, has a different name today, but he was the only person in the world expressing concern, and I believe this is still the very first case of influenza being reported because of how unusual and deadly that they thought it could be. Yeah, I saw that too, that the very fact that this guy reported it at all is remarkable.

Yeah, so they kind of trace it back and say, we now think we know where ground zero was. Haskell County, Kansas. So from Haskell County, Kansas, it went to Camp Funston, and then it went over to Europe. This is the first wave that we're talking about. They had to change their name because that used to be, we put the fun in Funston. Right, and then after that, they were like, yeah, we got to go to Fort Riley. So over in Europe, something happened to this flu, it mutated in some way, it did something, it mixed with some other flu, maybe from Asia, maybe something that was present in Europe.

Who knows? But there was a flu outbreaks over there in Europe, particularly at one called Etopoda. I think I added a little extra mustard on that, but that's generally how you say it. It was a huge British camp that held up to 100,000 troops, and it was packed elbow to the elbow in the summer of 1918. And so that definitely did not help keep the flu under wraps, it spread pretty quickly. And then some of those dough boys, those American soldiers fighting in World War I who were in Europe made their way back to the United States.

And so this strain of flu that had made its first wave out of Kansas over to Europe came back and when it came back, it was different in all the worst ways. Yeah. I mean, we were talking about how it got overshadowed by World War I, but it may not have even happened had it not been for World War I, because the conditions of army boot camp and shuttling soldiers overseas, like you were saying, it's tight quarters, it's like just dudes stacked on each other, all up in each other's faces, and it was just sort of a recipe for disaster. While this war was not unfolding, it had unfolded by that point, but it was really just a confluence

of factors. It was really kind of staggering. Well, plus also you can make the case that those Kansas farm boys never would have made their way to Camp Funston, and they certainly never would have made their way to Europe. So it probably wouldn't have happened, especially if the thing mutated in Europe and got worse. The Spanish flu, yeah, probably never would have happened had it not been for the First World War. Yeah.

The other problem was, and there were a lot of factors to why it spread so quickly, but one was because that it didn't really look like the flu in a lot of cases. Doctors really quite, you know, they were slow to diagnose as a flu and then as a epidemic, because a lot of people were dying from pneumonia, and for a while they thought it was bacterial in nature. So they were coming up with vaccines and all this stuff, and none of that was working. And so it kind of took a long time, but even though Dr. Minor in Kansas was kind of ringing the bell, no one was still paying attention.

So it took a long time for them to kind of sound the alarm and say, all right, we got a real problem here. Right. At the time, they knew that viruses existed, but they still weren't sure what they were. They called viruses filterable agents, because they had figured out, and I think back in 1892, that if you filtered an infection through something called a Chamberlain candle, which can filter out any and all bacteria, some infections still persist, which shouldn't be the case because you've just filtered out all the bacteria.

So that means that there's something smaller than bacteria that we don't really know about that can cause infection. There's some other pathogen out there. And this is the way that they approached viruses. I think by the time the Spanish Flea was still around, we knew that there was something out there, but no one had actually ever seen a virus and wouldn't see a virus until I think the 1930s, because they're too small for optical microscopes. So the idea that this was caused by a bacterial agent, it makes a lot of sense.

That's what humanity had experience in dealing with and treating. But then on top of it, like you said, so many people were dying or getting pneumonia that it just appeared like it was a horrible bacterial pandemic rather than a viral one. Or typhoid or cholera. It was misdiagnosed all over the place, because some of these symptoms were just unusual, like bleeding out of the ears. It's so bad. When you're bleeding out of your ears, things are going badly for you.

It doesn't get much worse than bleeding out of your ear. You have serious issues if you're bleeding out, unless of course you've nicked the inside of your ear with your fingernail. If you're bleeding out of your ear from inside of your head, that's bad news. Yeah. For sure. I just want to make sure I'm on the record as having that position on bleeding out of your ears.

Anti-ear bleeding. Yeah, pretty much. And with the war effort, like again, it's just all these things are kind of happening at once. So it was sort of just kind of sneaking through the back door in like the worst way you could ever imagine. So this is all going on. The reason we do know so much about it, and I know that it hasn't gotten all the attention

of like the plague and things like that, but in the medical community it has. They weren't like, all right, well that went away. That's great. Like here in modern times, like starting in the 1930s, they started on the download collecting blood samples and examining tissue slides and getting either from people who had died, like from the bodies, or from people that were still alive that survived it. And they have really been doing all this kind of cool, almost like a criminal case, like this research to try and learn because you don't want something like this to ever happen

again. Right, right. Well, one of the scary things, Chuck, is that like most people who are in public health and epidemiology and virology say like, yeah, this could totally happen again. And it would probably be way worse because of our connectivity or how connected we are. We probably have a greater chance of containing it just because of the advances in public health that we've undertaken thus far. But it could happen.

I actually talk about this a lot, including the Spanish flu and this one biotech episode of the end of the world. And from what I saw, it could very well happen just about any time. Well, this other part I don't quite get. Does this strain still exist or not? Because it was a little confusing in that part. Okay. Get this, dude.

It had gone totally extinct. Uh huh. Like it had come and gone as we'll see it just basically maybe it burned through everybody. It killed off everybody so fast that it couldn't spread any longer. And like you said, flu viruses mutate like very frequently. So also our body, like if you survive a viral infection, you typically are conferred immunity for the rest of your life. So the people who are left, we're not going to catch the Spanish flu again.

Right. Okay. It had run, it had run its course, gone extinct so much so that not even just the strain of flu, but all H1N1 flues left human circulation by the fifties, the 1950s. Somebody, this dude named Johann Holton, who's a microbiologist in the fifties and then later on in the nineties, he went to a little town called Brevig Mission, Alaska, and he dug up the corpse of a Native American woman and a UPAC woman who had died and had been buried in a mass grave from the Spanish flu and took samples of her lung tissue and took it back

to another microbiologist whose name I cannot remember, who basically synthesized the genome of it. Okay. Great. We understand it genetically. We've got it. No. They went one step further and actually created the Spanish flu virus again, resurrected it

from extinction. And yes, the Spanish flu is still around because humans brought it back to life. All right. Well, that makes more sense now. I mean, in one way. Right. Not that makes you sense. It's a great thing to do.

Well, what's funny is like, if you, depending on what you read, like if you read like a popular mechanics article about it, it's like, this is an amazing, great achievement. But for my money, it was a terrible achievement. I don't, I really don't think we should have taken that extra step and re-synthesized it. Although admittedly, we have learned a lot about the Spanish flu from that process, but I think there, you could have still stopped short from resurrecting it from extinction. Jeez. Yeah.

All right. So we've talked a lot about the three waves, which is really unusual for an epidemic like this. I mean, it had happened before, I've been thinking the 1600s and 1800s, but this was a whole different sort of beast. So that first wave hit in the spring of 1918, specifically like March and April. It was in the U.S., it was in Europe, and it was in Asia. So it's already, I mean, that's some serious ground that it's covered already.

Thanks again to World War I. Yeah. Exactly. So this, this one wasn't like super, super deadly. Military bases and camps was where it was mostly found. But again, with these troops moving everywhere, it was really kind of moving fast. The second wave was the really, really deadly one. And that's one where I mentioned it over about a four-week, I'm sorry, four-month, 16-week

period. It did most of the killing that fall, with October being the most deadly month in the United States. In the history of the United States to this day, it's the deadliest month, 195,000 people died in America from the flu in October of 1918. Yeah. Like literally everyone was touched in their family. Like there's no way to escape it almost at that point.

Yeah, and I mean, we'll talk about it later, but like this is, that's how a society can crumble. That's how like a small community can crumble when that many people die that quickly. Like things, things just get out of whack for, to say the least. Yeah. So this one, they think the reason this one came back so deadly was because it mutated over that summer and came back even more lethal than it was before. And some people who had been infected by that first wave did have some immunity on that

second wave, which is pretty interesting. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I guess if you survived the first wave, you would, especially if it was just a slightly mutated version of the exact same strain, I could see that. Well, that's what I wondered though, is like how much does something have to mutate before that immunity doesn't count? Well, I don't know. But we should say Chuck too, like we're speculating here that the first wave and the second wave

were the same strain of flu. Yeah, that's true. That's never been proven. And the same, like fluid samples and the tissue samples that you said they took back in the 30s, those were all from second wave victims and survivors. We don't have any samples from the first, and maybe not even the third wave, but definitely the bulk, if not all of the samples we have. And so all of the studying we've done has been from that second most deadly wave.

So they may not have been the exact same strain, but it is weird that people would have had an immunity to that second wave if they've been through the first. Yeah, I think it was connected for sure. I do too. So third wave hits after a short period of time. This was less widespread, not as severe as the deadly second wave, but worse than that first wave, which was not so deadly. And this was mainly through like the beginning of 1919 through April of 1919.

Yeah, Ed points out that like it depends on where you're talking about, but it was much more sporadic geographically. It wasn't like all from January to April, the whole world didn't have the flu. It's just around the world that flu outbreak was still going on, but not everywhere. Should we take another break? Let's. All right, we're going to take another quickie and then talk about kind of what also made this especially deadly right after this.

Hey friends, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lisa in Manitoba, who got the idea to Airbnb the backyard guest house over childhood home. Now the extra income helps pay her mortgage. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca slash host.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster?

Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Is that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing

on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're going to talk about what made this so deadly. In addition to the war going on at the same time, there were some other weird, weird factors and characteristics of this flu. Right, we mentioned young and healthy people already, but it bears saying again, the death rate for people between 25 and 34 was really, really high.

And conversely, children were infected at a high rate. It's not like they weren't getting it, but they had a low mortality rate and nothing about that makes sense. Yeah, so for the 25 to 34 age group who you would think would probably be the highest group of survivors, they had a two times higher death rate than the 45 to 64 age group during the Spanish flu. Which was ancient. Yeah, really.

I mean, if the average life expectancy normally was something in the 40s to the 50s, that is kind of ancient. Like I would be on death's door in 1918. Yeah, and just like with a typical flu, infants and the very elderly and the people with compromised immune systems, they died in the greatest numbers. But when you look at that graph, there's a huge spike among like young, healthy adults where they normally shouldn't be. And there's a lot of theories about why that happened.

One reason is because it was spread among soldiers and those soldiers were starting to come home at the time, so they spread it to their wives who were about the same age. They spread it to their children, they spread it to their friends. So it definitely was hanging around a specific age group. But they also think that there was a large amount of deaths and that this also accounts for the pneumonia deaths that killed so many people. Something called the cytokine storm, which sounds like terrifying to me. Yeah, that is when you have such an overstimulation of immune cells that it just generates.

Normally you drown in your own phlegm because of an overstimulation of immune cells creating so much fluid. Like your immune system is so good and so healthy, it kills you. Your immune response is so massive. And they're just starting to understand cytokine storms. Cytokines activate immune cells, and that's what causes the inflammation, the water on the lungs, which then gets infected by bacteria, which gives you pneumonia, which can kill you. They're just starting to understand this, but they have linked it to the appearance

of new flues that people haven't been exposed to before. And this is probably the number one reason why people who were young and healthy adults died in such numbers because their age group hadn't been exposed to any H1N1 flu before. So not only was this a new strain of H1N1, to their bodies, this was a brand new type of virus that they'd never been exposed to. And so people whose immune systems were over amped died from these cytokine storms, they think. Man.

Another unusual thing was how fast it killed you. There were cases where you would literally say, I'm not feeling so good. And then 12 hours later, you were dead. Can you believe that? Yeah. Victims died very, very fast, which when people are dying this quickly, it just compounds. And then you've got hospitals and overflowing with people, and then you can't care for them. And then people being turned away because they're too full, and then they spread it

more. And I mean, there are reports of people toe-tagging people that were still alive, because they just knew that they were going to be dead soon. Did you see that American Experience documentary on this? Yeah. It was really tough. Like what the apparently bedside manner just developed in the last couple of decades because... But did it?

Well, yeah, that's a good question. But I mean, can you imagine going to the doctor and the doctor saying, like, better get in line for a casket, son? Yeah. To a 12-year-old. Yeah, or telling your 12-year-old that you just punched that doctor in the mouth. Or putting a toe-tag on a live person. That's just nuts.

But there's verifiable reports that they did this. Of course, back then, if you were 12, you've seen a lot of life, kid. Right here in middle age. You've had two full careers. Right. You retired from coal mining at seven. But get yourself fitted for that casket because you're not going to live to see 30 like your old man.

And here's the lollipop. It's so sad. I know we're making fun of this, but that's the only way I can get through it. Another thing that it did was, well, we've already kind of hit on this a lot, but how far, how quickly it went so far. And again, largely because of this war and because it was attacking people so violently and quickly. Like U.S. towns in the United States tried to quarantine themselves, but it was just

too late. Like it was, you couldn't stem that tide at that point. You couldn't. There was a guy on that American Experience documentary who lived through it as a boy. And he was saying like, it was coming our way. It was coming down the highway toward us. Town after town, we get these flu outbreaks. And his town tried to quarantine themselves, but the mailman brought it in.

And you know, if it's not the mailman, it's going to be somebody else. If you have a soldier returning from home, from Europe, you're not going to be like, you can't come home yet. We got to wait till this potentially never ending flu epidemic goes away before you can come back home. Like there's just some way it's going to get through and it got through apparently everywhere except New Caledonia and American Samoa. Yeah.

Another thing, another characteristic of it was the symptoms it had. So like in addition to bleeding out of your ears, you would get mahogany cheeks, these weird brown spots on your cheekbones. You would turn blue because your, your lungs were not oxygenating the blood nearly enough. So your extremities and your face and lips would turn blue. You, there was a nurse in that documentary that said you needed to basically be on guard at all times because people would shoot blood out of their nose across the room. And like you would just have to step out of the way to not get splattered by it.

People would scream when they were touched even lightly. It was just an astoundingly bad flu. There was vomiting, nausea, like delirium. Just every, every horrible symptom you can think of people basically had. And this is like, if you were a doctor at the time, you're not like, oh, this is the flu. You were like, what is this? I've never seen anything like this before.

Well, and again, that led to it getting even worse because of the confusion again over symptoms, how slow they reacted because of the war. Like it's really hard to imagine a pandemic outbreak coinciding with a world war. Yeah. Like the likes of which the war, the world had never seen at that point. Yeah. You know? You know, people had room to really focus on one thing and they had to choose between

the war and the flu pandemic and they chose the war instead. Well, cause it was also a timing not to make too light of it, but back then it was when, you know, like you're not really sick. Like pull yourself up by your bootstraps and get to work. Right. You know, people didn't have, people didn't have the most sympathy for, for, you know, sickness like this. Get yourself fitted for a casket.

Stop complaining. So eventually they did, but it was just that slow, slowness to react that, that made it such a health crisis, especially in the U.S. Yeah. It's not like they didn't know that there was such thing as infectious disease and that if you banned public gatherings and said, no, you, you know, we got to close these movie theaters or these bars or not hold these parades, that it would have a positive effect on public health.

But they chose willfully, the people in charge chose not to out of a sense of patriotism and nationalism and the idea that you didn't want to have any impact on morale that public health commissioners around the country were just ignoring it and in cases where they weren't ignoring it, they were outright downplaying it in the press saying this is not, this is not a thing. It's fine. Like any, any reports you're hearing are overblown. And there was one commissioner in particular, a guy named Wilmer Crusen who was the health

commissioner of Philadelphia. Yeah. They hit really hard. They got hit the worst out of any American city and it was because of this guy and the moves that he made. And one of the big ones, one of the biggest mistakes he made, knowing full well that there was a flu pandemic going on in his city, he allowed a Liberty parade to take place in Philadelphia in September, late September, where 200,000 people showed up to the parade.

And within a few days, Philadelphia had it worse than anybody. In one day, 759 people died in Philadelphia in one day within a week or two of this parade taking place. Like the parade was, was, you know, moment zero for the real spread of the pandemic in Philadelphia. And it was this guy's fault. Yeah. That and his declaration, a virus in every cheese steak.

I don't know. It depends on the virus. I might still eat the cheese steak to tell you the truth. Oh man. I love a good cheese steak. Oh yeah. It's hard to find them in Atlanta. It really is.

There's a few good ones. Woody's of course over near the park is kind of the old standard. Do you like it though? Woody's. It's all right. I mean, it's pretty traditionally Philly like, is it? I thought they like left off the cheese was and put on ketchup. Really?

They don't put on ketchup. I think they do. Well, I just had one and had no ketchup on it. Well, maybe they changed the recipe because I swear to God, I've had one with ketchup on it there. Really? Mm-hmm. I know.

Did you ask for it bloody? Oh yeah. That was the problem. I asked for it with ketchup. They do. They do bastardize it with the, they have one version with bacon that is not as good as you would think. Like everything isn't better with bacon.

That's absolutely true because what they do is they, it's not like strips of bacon wedged in the roll. Mm-hmm. It's diced up and cooked with the meat. And normally I would say like, oh man, sign me up, but something about it just didn't work. Yeah. I think plus the fact that pigs are smarter than dogs also makes things less good with

bacon sometimes too. What? Yeah. They're really smart. I know, but why you got to bring dogs into this? Have you seen like that, that pita ad? It's like a pig? No.

It said a Labrador's body with the pig's head on it and it said like, if pigs looked like this, would you eat them or something? They got a bunch of stuff for it. It's a pretty weird looking ad too. Yeah. I would say so. All right. So let's talk about, let's wrap this puppy up.

Oh, okay. And the legacy of the pandemic of 1918, the Spanish flu also called the Spanish lady and the blue death and I think Flanders disease in Germany. Flanders. I'm not sure why, maybe it started near a place called Flanders. Yeah. And in Belgium, I believe, but that's, I mean, that's a pretty long standing tradition is blame some neighbor you don't really like for the flu that's killing off your population,

you know? Well, this was all blamed on Spain. They had nothing to do with it. You don't want to call it like us flu or anything. No. So I want to say one more thing though, Chuck. So we talked a little bit about the society breaking down, right? You said that people ran out of caskets.

I don't think like we really got that across like put yourself in a mind where there are so many dead people all of a sudden that you don't have any caskets to put them in anymore. You have to wait for them to hurriedly build more caskets. Unless the people that build the caskets are dead. Yeah. That's another real possibility too. Like imagine building a casket and falling into it from the flu and well, they just leave you in there because you are dead now.

Well, but that's what I mean. Like we're kind of kidding, but when I said it altered humanity like in a small town, what if the doctors died and the teachers died and then there were towns that may have survived but they had no infrastructure because there were no cops or doctors or teachers or, you know, police like, you know, it was, it was killing everybody. So yeah, so you could just be left, you know, with a bunch of 12 year olds. Right. Yeah.

Yeah. Children with a corn up in there. It kind of was. I'm sure that happened to a lot of towns that are now run by children as out of custom. Maybe so. That's probably where it started. Probably so. But the other thing that that was a casualty of the Spanish flu, especially in small towns

was like civic life. Because if you were healthy, you looked at other people on the street with suspicion. If you went out at all, you didn't stop and talk to people and say, hi, neighbor, you didn't do all the things that keep like a community glued together. And so communities started to fall apart. And then when public officials finally did start to react, they shut down schools, they shut down bars, they, they banned gatherings, sometimes banned funerals. Like you couldn't have a funeral for your, your dear departed mother.

You had to leave her in a box on your porch for the undertakers to come get on an open wagon. Like it's the medieval plague collectors, you know? Yeah. I mean, this was 1918. I know that sounds like a long time ago, but this wasn't the 16th century. No, no. So this is, this was going on.

And at the same time, it wasn't leaving a genuine lasting national impression on, on America or anywhere really in the world that I could see, which is really bizarre. Well, yeah, that's one of the weird things about its legacy is, and again, we hate to keep harrying this home, but because of the war, it wasn't like the Spanish flu went away, which was really weird. It went away very much kind of quickly and no one really knew why. But it's not like that happened. And then they were like, all right, well, man, we really need to change public health

policy and we really need to, to get all these breakthroughs and sanitation and vaccinations going and really, really take care of things now. They kind of were just like, oh, well, thank God that's gone. And it would be decades before they made real changes in policy to, to help prevent something like this. And it was really bizarre because you would think like, you know, when something like that happened, it would have that effect, but it didn't. It just didn't.

Like there were no teachable Oprah moments from it. It was just like you said, everybody was glad it was gone. Yeah. I thought the, the bit that Ed included about Woodrow Wilson, I had heard this before was really interesting. He was, he was US president at the time. He got the flu in January of 1919, obviously did not die from it. But there are people and historians that say that it altered him so much that it left him

very paranoid, very secretive and even caused him to impose harsher reparation, reparations on Germany in the Treaty of Versailles, which basically crippled Germany, which led to the rise of the rise of Naziism and the Nazi party, which led to World War II. So World War II may have never even happened. Who knows? Had it not been for Woodrow Wilson being sick with the Spanish flu? Maybe. It's bizarre.

It's a bit of a leap, but I have other people, I've heard that case made. I've seen it too. He just kind of changed and apparently took a completely different tack than he originally had intended as reparations against Germany. Yeah. And in US towns, it wasn't, I mean, this was the time when people opened up their door to a stranger and they were in need and that really changed that. Like people were, like you said, not only were they not hanging out on the street, but

like people were turning people away at gunpoint and people were taking their own lives and the lives of their family was just like, it was brutal. Yep. It was brutal and it's weird that it's not more recognized than it is, but hopefully we just contributed it to being remembered forever. That's right. That's what we know today because we've continued to study the flu of 1918, really how a pandemic can play out and it's not like science has forgotten.

They're still studying the causes and the repercussions and what we can do better. It's really interesting. Yeah. It's fascinating as what it is by God. If you want to know more about the Spanish flu, there's a lot more to it. We talked about everything we possibly could, but it's just big. You can go search for it in your handy search bar of your handy search engine on your handy computer.

Do that. Since I said that, it's time for Chuck. Oh yes. You say it. Okay. Administrative details. All right, everybody. This is the time of the show every quarter or so.

Is it quarterly, roughly? Yeah. Definitely after the holidays because we're thankful for everybody who thought of us over the holidays. That's right. We want to begin by saying we got a lot of Christmas cards and letters and rather than list all of those individually like we should, we're just going to give a blanket thank you for Christmas cards and letters and well wishes in the form of a written or typed letter.

It's always nice to get those still. I should say we're pretty thankful after the holidays. What else? Let's see. Adam, they sent us a wedding invitation and they got married in Phoenix the weekend after our live show in Atlanta. Mazel Tov and congratulations and best wishes to Danielle and Adam. That's right.

We got a very special gift. We got a real deal American flag that was flown in battle in combat. Wow. Major Mike Wilkes of the United States Air Force sent us this flag flown by Special Forces Ops crew on actual combat missions and it came with a certificate of its legitimacy signed by four of the crew members. Right. That's about as legitimate as it gets.

Yes. John Hank sent us some of his ready balm lip balm. I feel bad for John. That's a tough act to follow. But you can check out it's good lip balm. You can check it out at ready balm, R-E-A-D-Y, balm, B-A-L-M, fine, dot com. Ready Balm dot com by John Hank. We got a lot of pins, everybody.

We did our episode on ballpoint pins and people felt the need to share their favorites, which is pretty cool. So there will be some pins scattered throughout here. But first up, Christina Twig sent us her favorite pilot easy blue colored pilot easy touch fine point. Not bad. Still no pilot G2s, but it's not bad. Yeah.

I've been trying out these different pins though. That's interesting. There's another dude named, I can't try, I've tried them, but then they just like cramp my hand. Yeah. I start bleeding from under my fingernails. Sure. Something like that, you know?

I just can't do it. Yeah. Another guy who sent us pins is Ryan Pinto, who has a great name. Thanks, Ryan. That's right. Marcus Clader from the UK sent me a hand drawn film still from the movie Rushmore. Nice. He's a movie crush fan as well.

He said, he draws film stills by hand and send me one that you want me to do. So I picked the very famous last shot of Rushmore of Max and his teacher standing in front of each other to dance at the big dance while everyone else is dancing around them. And it's really, really pretty. I got to see it. I haven't seen it. It's awesome. Our old buddy Van Nostrand, one of the original fans, I would say.

Yeah. He and Lee are both pals. He sent us a satanic skull as is, you know, the huge and a vintage relief map of Puget Sound, his beloved sound. Yeah. That's because he's a big kayaker now and I hit him up yesterday and I said, thanks for the map. Mm-hmm.

And he said, now you will know where to find my body one day or something like that. Yeah. At the very least, we'll find his foot floating in Puget Sound, I'm sure. That's right. Aaron Cooper, speaking of old friends and listeners, Cooper has been around with us for many, many years and is very famous within our community for doing the excellent photo shops of us. And he still, every Christmas, sends us the selects in nice, large, printed form.

And he sent us another bounty of posters this year. What a great guy. He's also an administrator on the SYSK Army Facebook page. Yes, and also designs a lot of the t-shirts and just an all-around great guy. Yeah, good guy, great father. Nice goatee. Who else do we have, Chuck, Rebecca Rube? Yes, that's Rube, believe it or not.

Okay, good. I'm glad you corrected me because it's R-O-O-B and I was like, I feel bad, but I'm not calling Rebecca Rube and I'm glad it's Rube. So Rebecca Rube sent us a box full of goodies from South Dakota and especially for Chuck, a wean poster from the artist Shane Schroeder who can be found at sh-a-i-n-e-a-r-t.com, Shaneart.com. That's right. And if you live in South Dakota, particularly near Astoria, South Dakota, you can do a lot

worse than R&R landscape design, which is Rebecca's jam. She works out in gardens for people. Nice. That's very lovely work. That's good work, for sure. Who else? Mimi Bailey of Greenville, South Carolina sent a lot of cool things. They sent a toy for Momo.

Thank you. They sent some Neco wafers for me and I think Tiny Tabasco as well. And then Jerry, didn't you get a little tiny miso? Miso, because we always laugh about the miso soup with Jerry. Right, yeah. She loves miso. Yeah, that's for Mimi Bailey of Greenville. Siggy Holmgren, who also has a wonderful name, sent us some glass jewelry for our ladies.

And glass art by Siggy on Etsy is where you can find that stuff. Thanks, Siggy. Cameron Henley sent me. I've been talking a lot about my love for Australian Rules Football, specifically the Melbourne Football Club. So he sent me a Melbourne Football Club calendar for all those hunky men. I'm going to get it on the wall. Right.

Let's see, our buddy Sweetwater Dave, who's now become Badger Dave, who's now become New Hampshire representative Dave. Did we ever say that Dave won his election? I think we did. But a fair thing again. I hope so. He won his election. Congratulations, Dave.

He sent us some olive oil from Spain. That Badger, which is a company he works for, uses in some of their products and they also sell the olive oil straight up and he says it's great and Dave is right. So thanks, Dave. Hope you're doing well. We also got tiny Tabasco bottles from Nicky Carl and Jackson Russell. Nice. Nice family.

Who else? Allison Gallagher, who is also a movie crusher and stuff you should know, listener who recently moved to Atlanta. So welcome, Allison. Oh yeah, welcome. She sent a shirt that says with great beard comes great responsibility to me and a little iPhone plug-in fan because it gets so hot. You literally just plug it in to where you charge your iPhone and it spins a fan blade

and it goes, and I shall never be hot again. It's ear piercing, everybody. It's so loud. Laura Stewart sent some very nice gifts. She adopted an elephant in your daughter Ruby's name, Chuck, from the World Wildlife Foundation. That's right. And she also adopted a honeybee in mine and Yumi's and Momo's name. So thank you very much, Laura.

That was very kind of you. That was very sweet. This one came with an elephant plushie and my kid loves this thing, named it Navy. We didn't get a plushie. She said that she looked for a plush honeybee forest but couldn't find one, so she just sent us a dead bee. Oh, well that's nice. I'm just kidding.

With a stinger still intact. Right, right. With a post-it note with you written on it. Thanks Laura. I'm just teasing. Well, and thanks to everybody. That's all we have for now. If you think this is clean, if we did forget you, then bother us on email and we'll get

you in the next round. For sure. And if you want to get in touch with us, you can go to stuffyoushouldknow.com and check out all of our social links. You can also find me at thejoshclarkway.com and you can send me, Jerry, Chuck, and everyone involved an email to stuffpodcastathowstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of

the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands

give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band or each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.