And here's another one that most living Americans don't know about (and
maybe Europeans as well). That's the 1918-19 influenza pandemic. It
killed 675,000 Americans and 20-40 million people elsewhere including
very many WWI soldiers. <https://virus.stanford.edu/uda/>
It radically pruned a branch of my family tree by killing mother, father
and 6 of the children. Fortunately for me, it didn't kill my
grandfather and grandmother who survived to produce my father in 1921.
They're all buried in a mass grave in a little cemetery in Berkley,
Massachusetts. No stones or markers as in the rest of this old cemetery,
just a slight depression in the ground over an an area of maybe 8x8
feet. The cemetery says there are no records of it and no one is buried
there. My father, taught where it was as a child, told me otherwise.
Chuck Norcutt
On 11/12/2015 5:28 PM, Chris Trask wrote:
We actually did have a series medical crises, mostly outbreaks of
Yellow Fever in the 19th century, one of which began around New
Orleans and spread up the Mississippi to Saint Louis, killing more
than 20,000. The book "The American Plague: The Untold Story of
Yellow Fever" by Molly Crosby provides a good history of the event.
It arrived here from Africa by way of the slave trade, and the last
outbreak was in 1905.
Prior to that, the two strains of Malaria that continue to exist
along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts as far north as Washington DC were
a serious problem in the early years of European colonisation, even
though one or more strains exists in the estuary of the River Thames
and other areas in Europe. About 90% of Europeans died from this,
which prompted the beginnings of the slave trade as African natives
had evolved with Malaria and were fairly immune to the American
strains. The book "1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created"
by Charles Mann gives painful details about this era of American
history.
Chris
When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro - Hunter S. Thompson
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