Talk:Spanish flu

Edit request

The link at the end of the first sentence needs to be fixed. wtf guys I'd happily do it myself, but the article's been protected for some reason.

Probably political interference: the suggestion that an oriental origin is not acceptable in certain places. However, the result is a hodge-podge, where "the first confirmed outbreak" seems to be equally lacking in the necessary circumstantiation. The classic approach is called for: "The origins of the pandemic are unknown, although a number of hypotheses of various degrees of reliability exist:

..."

How you list those is up to the editor, working from the sources.

Origin theory

• I saw on a television program that this virus started as a mixture of parts of a human flu virus and a pig flu virus; neither could infect the other's host, but both could infect ducks, including both viruses at the same time. And the camp kept pigs and ducks to turn cooking and catering waste into meat. Anthony Appleyard (talk) 05:18, 27 August 2017 (UTC)

Within context of other large pandemics

I think The Atlantic newsmagazine is generally first-rate journalism. The following article puts the 1918 pandemic in context as compared to two earlier pandemics, and also as compared to WWI. It's an article about different potential ELE's (extinction level events). Cool Nerd (talk) 18:57, 19 December 2017 (UTC)

Human Extinction Isn't That Unlikely, The Atlantic, Robinson Meyer, April 29, 2016.

Spanish Flu

Ive always known this to be called Spanish Flu. Is there anyway it can be put in the title? Because when i searched for 1918 flu, the link came up. When i typed in Spanish flu the same link came up, but it could confuse someone into thinking there was 2 x 1918 flu that year because there was no distinction i could read from the search page about the link.

Maybe "1918 flu also known as Spanish Flu", or something like that.

What do you think?Cornersss (talk) 17:35, 28 January 2018 (UTC)

Yes, I agree that we should include the common name. I've also read that the reason it was called "Spanish Flu" was because of lack of wartime censorship in Spain!

Maybe we can include "also known as . . " in our lead. And going with what a variety of references say and dependent on what they say, an explanation of how it got this name in the body of our article. Thanks for bringing this up! I have a couple of other projects in the meantime. Please feel free to jump in and do this yourself.Cool Nerd (talk) 19:28, 8 February 2018 (UTC)

Incorrect date

First paragraph under "History" states the first diagnosis in Kansas was in March 2018. Should be 1918. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 63.123.140.114 (talk) 20:27, 31 January 2018 (UTC)

 Done, thanks! ~ Amory (u • t • c) 21:07, 31 January 2018 (UTC)

year later, recurrence in Winter of 1919-1920 had considerable higher death toll than for a normal flu season

https://academic.oup.com/jid/article/195/7/1018/800918

That's what this article is saying. Please see Fig. 2. Cool Nerd (talk) 19:32, 8 February 2018 (UTC)

Are we overstating worldwide death rate?

Our article currently states:

'and resulted in the deaths of 50 to 100 million (three to five percent of the world's population),'

"Historical Estimates of World Population". Retrieved 29 March 2013. Link seems broken.

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and yet, this source states:

Taubenberger, Jeffery K.; Morens, David M. (2006). "1918 Influenza: the mother of all pandemics". Emerging Infectious Diseases. 12 (1). Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: 15–22. doi:10.3201/eid1201.050979. PMC 3291398. PMID 16494711. Archived from the original on 1 October 2009. Retrieved 28 September 2009. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help); Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)

' . . . one third of the world's population (or ≈500 million persons) were infected and had clinically apparent illnesses (1,2) during the 1918�1919 influenza pandemic. The disease was exceptionally severe. Case-fatality rates were >2.5%, . . . '

Notice it's saying 2.5% of the people who got sick. Okay, let's dive in and try to get it right. Cool Nerd (talk) 19:52, 9 February 2018 (UTC)

Problematic paragraph in Legacy-section

"In Spain, sources from the period explicitly linked the Spanish flu to the cultural figure of Don Juan. The nickname for the flu, the "Naples Soldier", was adopted from Federico Romero and Guillermo Fernández Shaw's operetta, The Song of Forgetting (La canción del olvido), the protagonist of which is a stock Don Juan type. Davis has argued the Spanish flu–Don Juan connection served a cognitive function, allowing Spaniards to make sense of their epidemic experience by interpreting it through a familiar template, namely the Don Juan story.[99]"

By itself, this paragraph does not make sense. It does not follow from this text that Spaniards could "make sense" of the pandemic experience by linking it to the figure of a mythical womanizer and libertine. This either needs to be expanded on and explained (as I assume the text referenced does) or be deleted, as in its current form it is merely a bizarre distraction. 82.176.221.176 (talk) 16:10, 12 February 2018 (UTC)