Influenza: The Hundred-Year Hunt to Cure the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic Kindle Edition

Please read this book! I listened to my grandmother's takes of this pandemic. She lost one of her 9 brothers to it. It left one brother with lifelong lung problems. Being a curious child and teen I listened to a lot of first person accounts. All remembered the fear. For years many were reluctant to go to a hospital because they associated it with unnumbered dead and dying. And, of course, I myself endured a double diagnosis of flu and pneumonia . I found the book fascinating and factual. And I read it at the beginning of another novel virus pandemic covid 19 or corona virus. Exhibiting mild symptoms of some kind of flu I was e encouraged to not seem testing. To stay home and treat the symptoms unless I became unable to breathe. Which I've done..Stayed home, away from other members of my family and sterilizing everywhere I've been. And eating chicken soup....

This is one of the best books I've read in years. I really really wish that this book had come out a year before it did, maybe then we would have been more prepared for COVID19. This books outlines the reasons why we were not prepared for a reoccurrence of the 1918 influenza, let alone a new novel virus that acts very similar to influenza. How I wish we could force the idiots in Congress and in the White House to read this book, so they would be less scientifically illiterate than they already are. It really concerns me about the politics in science and medicine that have always been around, and how much danger men and women without any understanding of how a virus works, are influencing for the worse our medical infrastructure that is supposed to keep us safe during this time period.I teach physiology and pathophysiology, as well as biology. I usually recommend books to be read that will influence up and coming medical personnel. This will be at the top of the list. I cannot praise this book highly enough. There are other books that cover the history of the 1918 influenza. There are no other books that outline the effort to understand this virus, the science since 1918, the economic impact of not finding a vaccine or cure, the politics involve. This book is showing exactly what is going wrong currently as concerns the COVID19 pandemic, and how scarily similar it is to what happened in 1918.I highly recommend that the author write a new forward to this book when the pandemic of COVID19 winds down...and compare the two!

I read this book in the midst of a new pandemic, Covid-19, everything the book says about a pandemic, we are living it now. This book gave me insights on pandemics and provided me with the needed knowledge to evaluate on my own the truthfulness of the proliferating, often contradicting, information about the present pandemic.The flow of the book is easy and not too technical making it more comprehensible for a non-medical person like me. In light of the present situation, the pessimists in the epilogue handily were correct.

Another great book to read about what they know about the flu as well as what they don't know about the influenza virus. The great plague of 1918 was never seen before and they are predicting it was come again. The researchers have many stories and theories about how this global disease killed only a certain demographic group and not those whom they thought should have been. The whole picture was and still is being studied today. Reading any of the Flu books adds to your knowledge of how this virus mutates itself to adapt to humans each year. Fascinating.

This book would a good read any time; it's full of interesting historical and medical tidbits, and well written. In the time of the COVID-19 pandemic it's both valuably informative and somewhat depressing because we seem to be repeating a lot of the earlier history when we had an opportunity to learn from it and prepare better. This is a great introduction to what has been been learned about flu, especially since the "Spanish" flu pandemic of 1918-19, including many of the current topics including the use of social distancing and hopes vaccines.

Written recently, but before SARS 2 so up date on technical matters, and the recent recovery, after many false starts, of the virus from a body buried below the permafrost in Alaska. Virus is now in the medical equivalent of Fort Knox.Interesting that Spanish Flue is a misnomer and due to Spain being neutral during WWI so the epidemic widely published in Spain, whereas the belligerents had strict censorship on this and other matters. Origin was in the US (Ohio?) so should have been called the American Flue.Not covered in the book is the question of the effect of the US entrance into WWI. Undoubtedly a major morale booster for the Allies, but the effect of the spread of the flue from the arriving Americans on the French, British and other allies was profound: the decease was extraordinarily nasty with coughing so violent as to rupture muscles and skin discoloration intense to the point that race could not be determined, very few survivors.

A Wellwritten, accessible to non medical people account of the 1918 flu outbreak, along with current theories about the cause and what is being done today in case of another killer pandemic.

Just read the first few chapters to understand what a virus is and how it can change. " A virus is between a bacteria and a rock." This really helped me to better understand what is happening now (March 2020).