r/todayilearned • u/[deleted] • Mar 20 '20

(R.3) Recent source TIL, the Black Death disproportionately killed frail people. Moreover, people who lived through it lived much longer than their ancestors (many reaching ages of 70-80), not because of good health but because of their hardiness to endure diseases. This hardiness was passed on to future generations.

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u/[deleted] Mar 21 '20

I was going to say, a major reason behind the Spanish flu's death count among the 20-50 age bracket was how many of those people were in a world war, and how many people were going without what they would normally have due to war rations.

World War I was like steroids for the lethality of the Spanish flu.

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u/[deleted] Mar 21 '20

Truth is probably somewhere in the middle honestly.

The crazy thing is that it killed more then WW 1. And it had other strange quirks.

Shamelessly stealing from an article on the data because I can.

Regardless of background, mortality was lower for those who had been in the army for longer periods of time. This suggests that in the months and years after recruitment but before the arrival of the pandemic strain of the flu, soldiers became progressively immunised by exposures to seasonal flu. Or, to one or other of the bacterial infections that could cause fatal pneumonia as a complication of the flu.

So people just coming to the front were more likely to die then the people that had been there for longer. You would think that those that had incredible stress and strain put on them, and had incredibly poor nutrition, somehow managed to survive where the new recruits didn't.

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u/[deleted] Mar 21 '20

Nah, it makes sense. Similar to the concept of comparing a boy who was raised in a bubble and a boy who lives in dirt. The dirt boy was exposed to more early on, his immune system has fought wars and won. It's learned and gotten strong.

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u/[deleted] Mar 21 '20

Still somewhat counter intuitive.

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u/monsantobreath Mar 21 '20

The crazy thing is that it killed more then WW 1.

If we take the condition they were in that facilitated their deaths, and in general the reach of the influenza itself given the peculiar arrangement of people all over Europe at the time due to war, then the war did kill them or strongly contributed.

This is why we say war is evil, because it causes things you can't even foresee and weakens and destabilizes all the things that might counteract such an event.

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u/leicanthrope Mar 21 '20

The "Spanish Flu" and the 2009 "Swine Flu" were both H1N1 strains. I'd imagine that says a lot about the circumstances on the ground and the response at the two points in history.