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In these years, when the flu vaccine is minimally effective at best, many are skeptical about getting widely available vaccines. Dr. Monto said work is ongoing to produce much better flu vaccines. But he said the National Institutes of Health should tie funding requests for flu vaccine research to pandemic preparedness, as Congress doesn’t pay much attention to seasonal flu.
Historians say that indifference to the flu dates back to at least the 19th century.
Nancy Bristow, head of history at the University of Puget Sound, looked at newspaper articles and other sources from the end of the 19th to the 20th centuries and found that “the flu as a serious illness consistently refused to pay attention to it. ”
The flu wasn’t scary, said Dr. Bristow, “because it was so familiar.” It wasn’t even a reportable disease until the 1918 pandemic.
People underestimated the flu in advertisements. One published in the Atlanta Constitution of 1890 said: “Kerchew! Ah! Most people have the Influenza in some form and it affects Furniture, Carpet, Mantel, etc. We want to get Our Grip when you buy it.” (Influenza was once called Grip or Grippe, the French word for flu.)
An advertisement from the Golden Eagle Clothing Company suggested a “doctor’s prescription” for a “badly dressed” and “flu-suffering” boy, “The doctor impressed his mother to buy one of these $2.50 wool men’s suits.”
From time to time, public health officials issued warnings. Dr. One that Bristow found It was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1916. He said: “Don’t laugh at the concept. This is deadly and dangerous.”
The laughter ended in 1918, when a new strain of flu caused a pandemic with an alarming mortality. But when this epidemic ended, Dr. Bristow said peace of mind is starting again. People wanted to leave that terrible period behind.
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