OPINION — Editorial

It's not just a cold

The flu season turns deadly

At the end of a single week this flu season, the death toll stood at 13 more fatalities in Arkansas, including one child. And at last count, that raised the state's total number of flu-related dead to 49 and surely still climbing. The outlook was not hopeful after the latest report from the state Health Department's chief medical officer Gary Wheeler: "While we appear to have peaked," he says, "we've not seen a consistent downturn in cases at this point. We're still in the thick of flu season, basically."

Much the same dreary reports were coming in from officials of hospitals in Little Rock, Fort Smith, and Fayetteville. The chairman of Mercy Clinic Family Medicine in Fort Smith, Sean Baker, says this flu season is the worst he's seen in two decades.

So what is a potential flu patient, a category that includes all of us in Arkansas, to do now? The list of precautions is simple enough to follow: Get flu shots if you and yours haven't yet been vaccinated against this potential killer. And be sure to wash your hands often enough. Instead of shaking hands, try bumping fists or elbows, which should give your introductions a little jive.

It's all pretty typical for a flu season in Arkansas these days, though that may be of little comfort if you're stricken. Wayne Lyle, an emergency-room physician at Baptist Health Medical Center in Little Rock, says he sees 30 to 40 flu patients a day, and three to five of them are old folks who wind up coming down with pneumonia. And pneumonia can lead to death. Mr. Wheeler notes that it's "devastating to see these deaths, but it's an unfortunate, expected thing that we see almost every year."

In the long and sad history of influenza epidemics in this country and the world, most people couldn't afford to be as philosophical about them as Arkansas' officialdom this year. The world-wide influenza pandemic of 1918 killed upward of 100 million people, and the flu viruses in the early 1900s, including the one that ravaged the world in 1918, might have eventually killed a significant part of the whole world's population. At one point, a million people a week were dying somewhere on the planet.

One reason those astounding figures aren't better remembered is that they tend to get lost when compared to the number of troops who died in camps or in battle as the man-made plague of a world war was ending on the Western Front. Even such slaughters, it turns out, may be diminished in memory when they are lost in the bloody rush of the political and military news.

Who today remembers the polio epidemics that were once regular features of American life--and death--every summer? Today we tend to debate the presidential policies of a leader like Franklin Roosevelt rather than remember how he was stricken by polio in his prime. It was called infantile paralysis then, but FDR made it seem only incidental to his life and career as he assured the rest of us that we had nothing to fear but fear itself.

The centennial of the great influenza pandemic of 1918-20 now is passing almost unobserved, which makes it no less important. Philip Terzian, writing in the Weekly Standard, recalls asking his father about a photograph he'd spotted of people in Washington massed along a sidewalk, all of them wearing face masks. His father, a physician, explained that there had been a flu epidemic back then, and the streets were silent as people died or came close to dying.

Mr. Terzian concluded his article ("Bring Out Your Dead" in the Jan. 15 issue of the Standard) with this observation: "That such a spectacle, such a scene drawn from Dante or Dickens, as death in a plague year and horse-drawn oblivion should have taken place within living memory would have surely struck [my father] as reason enough to remember one centennial this season." And to give thanks for the strides medical science has made since. As we all should.

Oh yes . . . Don't forget that flu shot.

Editorial on 01/23/2018

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