Memory Monday: Avian Flu Vaccine, Some Chit-Chat, and Third Week of March 1918
by meep
Some good news for once: NIH approves clinical trials for vaccine against avian influenza
March 16 (UPI) — A federal agency is recruiting volunteers for two Phase 2 clinical trials for a vaccine against H7N9, a strain of avian influenza that has not reached humans in the United States.
The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is part of the National Institutes of Health, wants an effective vaccine ready for any H7N9 pandemics.
The trials, which will last 16 months, will test the effectiveness of different dosages of the inactivated influenza vaccine candidate, called 2017 H7N9 IIV, in conjunction with other vaccines.
The virus strain was first reported in humans in 2013 in China. Subsequently, six waves of H7N9 infection have occurred there, resulting in 1,565 human infections and 613 deaths, according to the World Health Organization in January.
Right now, people typically become infected through direct exposure to infected poultry or contaminated environments, and not from person to person. But if the virus mutates and becomes easily transmissible between humans, it could result in a pandemic, the NIH warns.
Because most people have little to no immunity to it, 39 percent of those who becme infected would die, the NIH predicts.
It’s a good idea to be developing this sort of thing before it gets to pandemic level.
FACEBOOK FLU CHITCHAT
FWIW, there’s no one hundred year element to pandemics. Think on the many waves of plague through Europe and Asia — sometimes it would be only decades apart. Sometimes centuries. There’s nothing particularly special about this being 100 years after the Spanish Flu pandemic, other than round numbers get our attention.
Also, the recent flu season wasn’t particularly deadly.
Oh look. About as deadly as the seasonal epidemic in 2014-2015. That wasn’t all that long ago.
It was particularly infectious, which is a different thing.
Maybe the final numbers will come in higher on the deaths, but I don’t think it’s going to move all that much. Especially since most of the deaths are from pneumonia.
THIRD WEEK OF MARCH 1918: FUNDRAISING
The front page of the Brewster Standard was given over to fundraising stories, primarily. It’s pretty much every week – here are two examples.
Knights of Columbus drive:
Red Cross asking for old clothes for Belgian refugees:
I thought it interesting that the Red Cross asked people not to put notes in the pockets of donated clothes. I wonder what people had been writing. (They obviously had to tell people this because people were doing it)
CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENTS
One aspect of this time many forget is that World War I also coincided with the Progressive push for a number of Constitutional amendments, , two of which were ultimately ratified: women’s suffrage (which stuck) and Prohibition (which did not stick).
Let’s go with a story on the Women’s Suffrage meeting:
And a more interesting item (not sure if it’s an ad or what — it was below some party election info), accusing the Prohibitionists to be anti-Labor.
Well, employers did like their workers to be sober, that’s for sure.
The 18th amendment – Prohibition – was ratified January 1919. So I expect to see more about that in the paper over the year. New Yrok didn’t ratify til January 1919 itself, and local states Connecticut and Rhode Island rejected it. Very interesting.
The 19th amendment – Women’s Suffrage – was ratified August 1920. New York was one of the early ratifiers on this one, as opposed to its straggler status on Prohibition.
TIDBITS
I saw no suspicious deaths reported in the paper.
I did want to talk a moment about stuff thrown in as filler – they run small items that are usually only a a sentence or two, often with a smartass remark attached. Some of them would work fine on twitter today… but the “wittiness” or sharpness of the remarks just make me wonder.
I’m pretty sure one can say disparaging remarks about the U.S. in England now without fearing jail. Can’t say that the U.S. was all that great on First Amendment issues at the time, so
As for that second thing, was that supposed to be funny? Readers Digest can manage to come up with better domestic digs than that. There was also a smartass remark on the Kaiser and his family a few more items down (punctuated by an ad in text) that also just lies flat.
Brewster Standard, you’d just get ratioed on twitter now…. or, more likely, just ignored. This is really boring stuff.