The 1918 influenza pandemic hit the world at a vulnerable time, in the midst of World War I. The first wave occurred in the US in the spring of 1918, and the second began in the fall, just a couple of months before Germany signed the armistice ending the war [1]. With much of the world being engaged in such a devastating war, a lot of the news coverage of the pandemic played to this fact. In fact, the name ‘the Spanish Flu’ took hold because as a neutral country, Spain was one of the only countries able to freely publish information on the subject, causing an association to develop between the country and the virus [1]. This association did not stop other other false claims about the virus' origin from spreading, however, and a particularly common one was the claim that the Germans had purposefully infected Allied soldiers to weaken their enemy’s forces [2, 3]. While this may seem a farfetched theory, a look at the long and storied history of biological warfare makes apparent why people in those days might have found the idea so plausible. One reason why this theory may have been popularized was the seemingly logical progression of it all. Use of chemical weapons like chlorine gas and phosgene during WWI had been rampant [4], so why stop there? If the German forces were suddenly afflicted by this illness, why not make the other side suffer as well by allowing an infected soldier to spread disease to the Allies? One common theory was that a German ship brought the virus to Boston [5]. Of course, not all of the theories as to how the spread would have occurred were as simple as walking an infected German soldier right up to the Allies, or letting one be captured. U-boats and mutagenic gases were also frequently cited as tools the Germans may have used to infect Allied soldiers, as was Bayer aspirin, a drug manufactured in Germany [3, 6]. There were any number of ways the Germans could have used this flu to their advantage, if papers from 1918 were to be believed. Motive and opportunity were not the only reasons why people speculated that Germany was somehow to blame for the pandemic. The use of biological weapons has been recorded for centuries, and certainly extends far beyond that. Archaeologists have found prehistoric evidence that peoples in North and South America, Africa, and Asia all employed techniques of contaminating weapons like arrows in ways that likely introduced pathogens to the victim [7]. One example of this was a Melanesian tribe that covered their arrows with material from crab burrows that contained tetanus-causing bacteria. It is yet unknown the extent of such practices, or the effectiveness of them, but this demonstrates the likelihood that biowarfare has been at least attempted for thousands of years. In the ancient world, regardless of the actual use of biological weapons, there was certainly a fear of them. When Athens experienced an outbreak of disease in 430 BCE, they initially blamed the Spartans of poisoning the water [7]. However, there is little evidence of biological weapons, or even poisons, being used in war from ancient times until the 14th century. The earliest recorded example of biological warfare is also arguably the most well-known. In 1346, Mongols sieged the Crimean port city of Kaffa (also spelled Caffa). Having been struck by plague, and likely unable to maintain the siege for much longer, the Mongols were said to have catapulted diseased cadavers into the city in order to infect those inside the walls [8]. It is difficult to corroborate such reports, but some historians agree on the plausability of this account. Another possibility is that diseased rats carried the plague from Mongol camps inside the walls of Kaffa, which many rule as the more likely explanation [8, 9]. It is even debated if this event ultimately caused the spread of plague into Europe, initiating the black death (Figure 1). Figure 1: "Tentative chronology of the intial spread of plague in the mid-14th century"; implicates Kaffa as the route by which plague reached Europe [8] This is far from the only instance of specifically plague-based biowarfare. Similar accounts exist of cadavers being catapulted at enemy troops by the Lithuanians in 1422 and by the Russians in 1710 [9]. Biological weapons were also notoriously used against Native Americans during the conquest and colonization of the Americas. Spanish distribution of clothing contaminated with the causative agent of smallpox, the variola virus, amongst Native populations in South America in the 16th century led to widespread epidemics of the disease, and caused a significant number of deaths as a result [10]. Similar tactics would continue to be used across the Americas. A couple of centuries later, British forces would deliberately distribute blankets contaminated with smallpox to Native Americans to reduce their numbers during the French and Indian War [12, 10]. Figure 2: Native Americans had no natural immunity to smallpox, leading to severe illness and often death [11] Regardless of the extent to which biological warfare was truly practiced, stories of such events were well-known across the world. It is unsurprising that people in the US would suspect a German biological weapon giving the timing of the 1918 influenza pandemic intersecting with the final year of WWI. Even in 2020, with significantly more knowledge of the causative agent and not being engaged in armed conflict with the country of origin, conspiracy theories of Covid-19 being a biological weapon widely circulated [13]. It is arguably more justifiable for such conspiracies to have been popular in 1918. The timing of the pandemic, in conjunction with this long history of the use and suspicion of biological weapons, created a perfect storm for Germany to take the blame. References 1. Brown, J. (2018). Influenza: the hundred-year hunt to cure the deadliest disease in history. Touchstone.
2. Dicke, T. (2015). Waiting for the Flu: Cognitive Inertia and the Spanish Influenza Pandemic of 1918–19. Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 70(2), 195–217. https://doi.org/10.1093/jhmas/jru019 3. Johnson, N. A. (2018). The 1918 flu pandemic and its aftermath. Evolution: Education and Outreach, 11(1), 5. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12052-018-0079-5 4. Rancourt, R. C., Richardson, J. R., Laskin, D. L., & Laskin, J. D. (2020). Chemical Weapons. In Environmental Toxicants (pp. 261–284). John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119438922.ch8 5. Davis, D. A. (2011). The Forgotten Apocalypse: Katherine Anne Porter’s “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” Traumatic Memory, and the Influenza Pandemic of 1918. The Southern Literary Journal, 43(2), 55. 6. Honigsbaum, M. (2018). Spanish influenza redux: revisiting the mother of all pandemics. The Lancet, 391(10139), 2492–2495. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(18)31360-6 7. Carus, W. S. (2017). A Short History of Biological Warfare: From from Pre-History to the 21st Century. National Defense University Press. 8. Wheelis, M. (2002). Biological Warfare at the 1346 Siege of Caffa. Emerging Infectious Diseases, 8(9), 971–975. https://doi.org/10.3201/eid0809.010536 9. Ligon, B. L. (2006). Plague: A Review of its History and Potential as a Biological Weapon. Seminars in Pediatric Infectious Diseases, 17(3), 161–170. https://doi.org/10.1053/j.spid.2006.07.002 10. Morse, S. A., & Meyer, R. F. (2017). Viruses and Bioterrorism. Reference Module in Life Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-809633-8.11007-6 11. Britain wages biological warfare with smallpox - Timeline - Native Voices. (n.d.). Retrieved March 20, 2021, from https://www.nlm.nih.gov/nativevoices/timeline/229.html 12. Christopher, L. G. W. (1997). Biological Warfare: A Historical Perspective. JAMA, 278(5), 412. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.1997.03550050074036 13. Imhoff, R., & Lamberty, P. (2020). A Bioweapon or a Hoax? The Link Between Distinct Conspiracy Beliefs About the Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) Outbreak and Pandemic Behavior. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 11(8), 1110–1118. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550620934692
0 Comments
|
Writers:Catherine Discenza ArchivesCategories
All
|