Comments on the nonpharmaceutical interventions in New York City and Chicago during the 1918 flu pandemic
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BioMed Central
Open Access
Editorial
Comments on the nonpharmaceutical interventions in New York City and Chicago during the 1918 flu pandemic John M Barry Address: Center for Bioenvironmental Research, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA, USA Email: John M Barry - [email protected]
Published: 11 December 2007 Journal of Translational Medicine 2007, 5:65
doi:10.1186/1479-5876-5-65
Received: 30 November 2007 Accepted: 11 December 2007
This article is available from: http://www.translational-medicine.com/content/5/1/65 © 2007 Barry; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract This commentary was originally published in CIDRAP News and it is here reported almost verbatim to allow divulgation through open access. The Editorial summarizes John Barry's concerns about the value of accurate historical reporting and its implications in public policy determination. This short abstract was written by the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Translational Medicine to introduce the Editorial.
Editorial Remarks from CIDRAP Director Michael T. Osterholm, PhD, MPH John M. Barry is one of our nation's most respected historians, and his chronicle of the 1918 pandemic, The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History, is regarded by many influenza and public health experts as the definitive historical review of that event [1,2]. To paraphrase the old E.F. Hutton commercial, "When Barry speaks, most of us concerned about our preparedness for the next pandemic listen." You will find below a commentary from Barry dealing with the important question of the use of nonpharmaceutical measures during the 1918 pandemic.
As any reader of this Web site knows, CIDRAP has made pandemic influenza preparedness one of its highest priorities as an infectious disease research and policy organization. I believe the next influenza pandemic, if even moderate in nature, will be one of the most catastrophic public health events in history. I come to this conclusion because of the size of the world's population today (approximately 6.5 billion, compared with 1.2 billion in 1918), the likelihood that there will be a lack of stock-
piled and effective pandemic vaccine at outset of the pandemic, and the existence of the global just-in-time economy, which means we will soon exhaust many critical products and services, like drugs and vaccines, other medical supplies, and even food, in the early days of the pandemic. Frankly, our one real hope is that all the other public health tools we have employed in past infectious disease epidemics will make a difference. These tools have largely tried to change individual and community-based behavior to avoid exposure to the infectious agent until after the epidemic has run its course. These are often referred to as nonpharmaceutical i
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