Berkeley - There has never been a flu epidemic like it. In one year - 1918 - half a million Americans died from a contagion often identified as the deadliest epidemic of the 20th century, a flu so severe that the fear of it happening again causes public health authorities to go on global alert.
Now a researcher in demography at the University of California, Berkeley, has evidence that undetected tuberculosis, or TB, actually may have caused much of the mortality in 1918.
If so, such a deadly flu may not occur again, at least not in the United States which has low rates of TB infection, reports Andrew Noymer, UC Berkeley doctoral student in demography, a department in the College of Letters and Science. He published his findings in the current (September) issue of Population and Development Review, the main journal of the Population Council.
Noymer's evidence comes from patterns of mortality in the U.S. population in the years after the epidemic year. Death rates from tuberculosis fell dramatically in 1919 and 1920 and, for decades thereafter, changed an historic gender pattern in mortality.
Apparently, those who died from the flu already had diseased lungs. When they got the flu, it turned into pneumonia, which in those people with TB became especially severe. It was the pneumonia complicated by TB that killed them, said Noymer. Their early demise depressed the death rate from TB in the following years.
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