The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague In History
The Fantastic Bug: The Epic Tale of the Deadliest Plague In History Books
Product Description
No disease the world has ever known even remotely resembles the fantastic bug epidemic of 1918. Presumed to have begun when sick farm animals infected soldiers in Kansas, spreading and mutating into a lethal strain as troops carried it to Europe, it exploded across the world with unequaled ferocity and speed. It killed more people in twenty weeks than AIDS has killed in twenty years; it killed more people in a year than the plagues of the Middle Ages killed in a century. Victims bled from the ears and nose, turned blue from lack of oxygen, suffered aches that felt like bones being kaput, and died. In the United States, where bodies were stacked without coffins on trucks, near seven times as many people died of bug as in the First World War.
In his powerful new book, award-winning historian John M. Barry unfolds a tale that is magisterial in its breadth and in the depth of its research, and spellbinding as he weaves multiple narrative strands together. In this first fantastic collision between science and epidemic disease, even as society approached collapse, a handful of heroic researchers stepped forward, risking their lives to confront this weird disease. Titans like William Welch at the newly formed Johns Hopkins Medical School and colleagues at Rockefeller University and others from nearly the people revolutionized American science and broadcast health, and their work in this crisis led to crucial discoveries that we are still using and learning from today.
The Washington Post’s Jonathan Yardley said Barry’s last book can “exchange the way we reckon.” The Fantastic Bug may also exchange the way we see the world.
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It is unfortunate that the awesome power of vitamin C to fight infectious diseases — including bug and the common cold — was not known in 1918. Many thousands of lives may possibly have been saved if vitamin C had been readily available as it is now.
Unfortunately, the power of vitamin C to fight bug is still not acknowledged by the orthodox medical establishment, even though numerous published scientific studies have shown vitamin C, at adequate doses, to be very powerful at killing viruses and, thus, protecting us from their ill effects. One reason for this misunderstanding is that the orthodox medical establishment considers only about 90 mg of vitamin C daily to be needed by humans, and this dosage will not fight bug. But, the actual dosage of vitamin C most humans need is at least 2,000 mg each day below normal conditions and much higher amounts when an infection starts to occur.
For those who are willing to consider the benefits of vitamin C and other nutrients in fighting illness, I urge the book How to Feel Better and Live Longer by Dr. Linus Pauling, the only person to have won two unshared Nobel Prizes.
Rating: 4 / 5
Not near enough in rank about what a consumer may possibly or should do to help themselves. I didn’t realize this was a puff piece for the medical profession.
Rating: 2 / 5
Well written and well researched. The book reads like a thriller. It documents the beginnings of the pandemic, the state of medicine and research at the time and the societal, medical and political responses to the risk.
Extremely informative with a currency that doesn’t fade with time.
Rating: 2 / 5
The one thing that is fake in this book even though it claims to have a lot of facts, is that it says the bug caused panic among the citizens. In fact, it didn’t cause “panic.” If you can presume that in 1918 there was small communication between cities and people were dying but other cities didn’t even know about it until months later.
If you were to read A Bird Named Enza by Dawn Meier you would find out that not only was there no panic but people were marvelous heroes and didn’t run into the streets or commit suicide, but tried to help one another in a situation that was absolutely foreign to each citizen.
Don’t read this book as fact, it is just like a lot of other books in that it is gleaming a bunch of “facts” and saying it is right.
A Bird Named Enza is a first-hand account of someone who lived through the bug. Not a bunch of historical “facts” from some library.
A BIRD NAMED ENZA
Rating: 1 / 5
If I were sick, it would be an explanation as to why I bought this piece of crap!
If I had sought after a history lesson on all of the doctors of the 15th century through today, I’d have looked for one to buy. This is a dull and complicated read about early times in medicine period.
I’m over 1/4 way through this horrible book and have not even gotten to any flu issues yet. This is so dull, that I’ve resulted to speed reading just to get through it. What a waste of money! If I may possibly have given it 1/2 star or none, I’d have done so.
DO NOT BUY IF YOU’RE INTERESTED IN LEARNING ABOUT THE FLU EPIDEMIC OF 1917.
Rating: 1 / 5