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The Brazilian Navy faces its worst enemy in WWI: The Spanish flu
Posted On: March 14, 2012 - 4:30pm
Few people know about the participation of Brazil in Word War I. Although Brazil remained neutral during most of the conflict, it eventually sent a fleet to support the war effort against the central powers...
...Now a group of Brazilian and Australian epidemiologists and naval historians led by Dr. Wladimir J. Alonso, from the Fogarty International Center of the National Institutes of Health, has been looking at those reports to find the extraordinary conditions accounting for what was the highest influenza mortality rate on any naval ship reported to date...
Schuck-Paim et al. (2012) Exceptionally high mortality rate of the 1918 influenza pandemic in the Brazilian naval fleet. Influenza and Other Respiratory Viruses DOI: 10.1111/j.1750-2659.2012.00341.x.
Results
The outbreak that swept this fleet included the highest influenza mortality rate on any naval ship reported to date. Nearly 10% of the crews died, with death rates reaching 13–14% on two destroyers. While overall mortality was lower for officers, stokers and engineer officers were significantly more likely to die from the pandemic, possibly due to the pulmonary damage from constant exposure to the smoke and coal dust from the boilers.
Conclusions
The fatality patterns observed provide valuable data on the conditions that can exacerbate the impact of a pandemic. While the putative lack of exposure to a first pandemic wave may have played a role in the excessive mortality observed in this fleet, our results indicate that strenuous labor conditions, dehydration, and exposure to coal dust were major risk factors. The unequal death rates among vessels remain an open question.
