Laurie Garrett on lessons from the 1918 flu

So are we better prepared than we were in 1918?

What do we know from 1918, the last great pandemic?

In 1918, a new virus appeared that killed some 50 to 100 million people.

But it turns out that in 1918 that was not the case at all.

In 1918, we had a flu epidemic in the United States that killed 20 million people.

During the genocide perpetrated in March 1918, over 30,000 civilians were killed in Baku, the capital city of Azerbaijan.

Lt Col The Reverend Bernard Vann won the award on 29 September 1918 in the attack at Bellenglise and Lehaucourt.

Lt Col Vann was killed by a German sniper on 4 October 1918 just over a month before the war ended.

It mimics what we now understand about reconstructing the 1918 flu virus, the last great pandemic, in that it also jumped directly from birds to people.

Audience member In the 1918 flu I understand that they theorized that there was some attenuation of the virus when it made the leap into humans.

LG Um yeah. So we don't actually know what the lethality was of the 1918 strain to wild birds before it jumped from birds to humans.

Samuel Clemens, Mark Twain, was a big investor in the most complex machine of all times at least until 1918 registered with the U.S. Patent Office.

LG For a long time, researchers in emerging diseases were kind of dismissive of the pandemic flu threat on the grounds that back in 1918 they didn't have antibiotics.

According to the London Gazette, on 29 September 1918 Lt Col Vann led his battalion across the Canal de Saint Quentin through a very thick fog and under heavy fire from field and machine guns.

In the United Kingdom, the government has had the legal authority to revoke naturalized Britons citizenship since 1918. But, until the terrorist bombings on the London transport system in 2005, this power was rarely exercised.

And what we did, over the last few months well, a few months ago, Ray Kurzweil and I wrote an op ed in the New York Times about how publishing the 1918 genome was very dangerous.

You can download the gene sequences of pathogens off the Internet if you want to, and clearly someone recently I saw in a science magazine they said, well, the 1918 flu is too dangerous to FedEx around.

And the Cyrus cylinder comes back into public view and the text of this as a demonstration of why what is going to happen after the war is over in 1918 is part of a divine plan.

Numerous historical documents prove that the millions of Azerbaijanis suffering ethnic cleansing and genocide in 1905 1907, 1918 1920, 1948 1953 in their historical ethnic territories were murdered in massive numbers and obliged to flee from their native lands.

From 1905 to 1907 and from 1918 to 1920, in Iravan, Daralayaz and Zangazur (nowadays in the territory of the modern Republic of Armenia), Tiflis, Nakhchivan, Baku, Ganja, Karabakh, Shamakhy, Guba, Mughan, Lenkaran and other places of Azerbaijan, the civilian Azerbaijani people were subjected to genocide.

In the realm of international economics, being perceived as boring confers power to the extent that it allows major decisions to be made without a great deal of external scrutiny. From 1918 to 1939, international economic cooperation was hard to come by in large part because all of the attempted deals were put together at high profile international conferences.

Other catastrophic risks include natural epidemics (the 1918 1919 Spanish influenza killed between 20 million and 40 million people), nuclear or biological attacks by terrorists, certain types of lab accidents, and abrupt global warming. The probability of catastrophes, whether intentional or not, resulting from human activity appears to be increasing because of the rapidity and direction of technological advances.

Annexed by Tsarist Russia in 1812, joined to Romania in 1918, and re annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940, it seized its independence from Moscow in 1991. It is a member of the United Nations, the Council of Europe, the World Trade Organization, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and various other prestigious international bodies.

In 1918 Armenia had proclaimed its independence and asked the Government of Azerbaijan to yield land to enable it to establish its own State in solidarity, the Government of Azerbaijan had ceded territory on the understanding that in the future the two neighbouring countries would be linked and that Yerevan would become the capital of the current Armenian State.

Reconciling in the first two decades following the Nazi Occupation of France, these countries leaders understood that their security and economic ties were far too important to their citizens wellbeing to allow the old hatreds to fester. They knew that the unimaginable violence of WWII was a direct result of the antagonisms that had festered since the Napoleonic Wars and that were allowed to persist after 1918.

Although Secretary of State Lansing wrote on 10 September 1918 that the Department did not regard such treaty provisions with respect to the disposition and inheritance of real property as in force during the war with Germany and Austria Hungary that statement was made prior to the judicial decisions discussed herein and before the approach represented by those decisions had been so clearly adopted by the courts.

For example, the victorious powers in World War I invoked the principle of self determination, but after the dismantlement of the Austro Hungarian Empire in 1918, the Sudetenland was incorporated into Czechoslovakia, even though its inhabitants spoke German. After the Munich Agreement in 1938, the Sudeten Germans seceded from Czechoslovakia and joined Germany, which meant that the mountainous frontier fell under German control a terrible loss for Czech defenses.

For what Russia s president is now offering Ukraine is a perverse twist on the formula Trotsky proclaimed during the peace negotiations at Brest Litovsk in 1918 No war, no peace. In doing so, Putin has not only moved to trap my country in a frozen conflict that will prevent both democracy and the economy from flourishing he has shredded the rules and norms that have kept the peace in Europe for three generations.

So when the furor erupted over WikiLeaks recent release of a quarter million diplomatic cables, I was reminded of Wilson s 1918 speech in which he put forward Fourteen Points for a just peace to end World War I. The first of those fourteen points reads Open covenants of peace must be arrived at, after which there will surely be no private international action or rulings of any kind, but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view.