Influenza : $b An epidemiologic studyVaughan, Warren T. (Warren Taylor)
History
Influenza : $b An epidemiologic study
Vaughan, Warren T. (Warren Taylor)
Influenza
We may agree with Winslow and Rogers, who conclude that the proportion
of the population actually affected by the influenza epidemic in 1918
varied between 200 and 400 per thousand.
_Relation of sex to morbidity._—Abbott concluded from his studies in
1890, that the weight of testimony appears to favor the statement that
persons of the male sex were attacked in greater number and with greater
severity than females. Leichtenstern reached similar conclusions. In the
epidemic of 1889, the males were attacked more frequently than the
females. He attributes this to two causes: first, the greater exposure
to infection, and; second, the fact that strong, robust individuals are
more frequently attacked.
It is amusing to compare this explanation with another found in the
Medical Supplement to the Review of the Foreign Press for March, 1919.
“A Spanish mission composed of Maranon, Pittaluga and Falco visited
Paris last October to collect information as to the identity of the
Spanish epidemic with the world pandemic of influenza. They found that
the epidemics in France and Spain were absolutely identical from the
epidemiologic, bacteriologic and clinical standpoint. The great majority
of the severe cases in both countries occurred between the ages of 16
and 40. Both in France and Spain more females than males were attacked,
which was possibly explained by the greater tendency of the former to
lead an indoor existence.”
Jordan, Reed and Fink, working in Chicago, found very different results.
They could discover no noteworthy difference among the pupils in high
school and elementary school. The attack rate was 230 for the boys and
231 for girls. One sex was presumably as much exposed as the other.
Among the employees of the Chicago Telephone Company, on the other hand,
the men were affected in considerably lighter proportion than the women
(151 per 1,000 as compared with 233 per 1,000 for women). Jordan
believes that the age factor was largely responsible for the difference
as the women employees are as a rule of much lower average age than the
men.
Frost found that with few exceptions the attack rate at all ages was
somewhat higher in females than in males. The total excess of incidence
in females was six per cent., which ranged from an excess of nineteen
per cent. in the highest locality to a deficiency of two per cent. in
the lowest. Only two of the eleven localities surveyed showed a lower
incidence among females than among males.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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