In France, where I live, there are more than 170,000 monuments to the First World War. To my knowledge, there is only one to the 1918 influenza pandemic. A simple stone cross, it stands at Lajoux in the Jura Mountains, close to the border with Switzerland.
This relative neglect of the 1918 pandemic is almost understandable in France, which lost approximately six times as many citizens to the war as it did to the flu. But that neglect is repeated in almost every country in the world, and globally it is much harder to explain. The pandemic is estimated to have killed between 50 and 100 million people worldwide, compared to around 18 million for the war. Why, then, do we commemorate the war but not the flu? Is a death from disease less important than a death by combat, and if so, shouldn’t that trouble us?
I think it should, and not for purely moral or philosophical reasons. The threat of pandemic is no historical artefact; in fact, another flu pandemic is almost inevitable. The World Bank estimates that if a strain of the influenza virus as dangerous as the one that triggered the 1918 pandemic were to emerge in future, it could kill 33 million people in the first six months of the ensuing pandemic, and trigger a major recession. Yet governments are not making the relatively small investments that would render healthcare systems resilient to such a disaster, and vaccine hesitancy is on the rise in many parts of the world.
No comments:
Post a Comment