Skeletal evidence shows that frail people were more likely to perish during influenza pandemic
Influenza tore through the world’s population in 1918 and 1919, killing up to 50 million people. One counterintuitive feature of this pandemic has puzzled researchers ever since. According to contemporary accounts and later demographic studies, a disproportionately large number of young, healthy individuals died. A new analysis of skeletons from the time challenges this notion, suggesting that people who were already frail were the most likely to succumb, as is true for most pandemics.
Scientists are still debating these explanations, and more than one factor could be involved. For her Ph.D. project, Wissler—then a doctoral student at Arizona State University—decided to tackle the issue by asking a different question: What if the flu’s victims weren’t all that healthy in the first place? She teamed up with Sharon DeWitte, an anthropologist at the University of Colorado, to analyze the skeletons of 81 people who died in Cleveland, Ohio, between September 1918, and March 1919.
She and DeWitte determined that before the flu pandemic, frail people were more likely to die than healthier people, which is no surprise. Individuals with active lesions only lived to a median age of 39, whereas people with healed lesions survived to age 45. But contrary to conventional wisdom about the pandemic, unhealthy people remained the most vulnerable as the flu swept through the city.
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