# 2685
Emmy Fitri writes for the Jakarta Post, something she does exceedingly well. Her work often appears under the Opinion banner, and over the years she has been a vocal advocate of preparing for a pandemic.
Today, with the help of Arie Rukmantara - who is a consultant with a UN agency in Indonesia - she has produced a partial retelling of Indonesia's experience with the 1918 Spanish Flu Epidemic.
Throughout the world memories of that pandemic have been largely forgotten. Movies, books, television, and even song have neglected that event. Compare the number of cultural references there are to WWI to that of the Spanish Flu?
It is as if the pandemic was so traumatic that we've agreed, silently, to forget those 18 months. Almost as if to speak of them is to tempt fate.
It has only been in recent years that historians and authors have attempted to fill in the details on this `blank spot' in our not so distant past.
The mantra is that the Spanish Flu claimed 2.5% of it's victims. And that appears to be true here in the United States, and in large parts of Europe. But we know that in other nations around the world, the toll was much higher.
And as relayed in this article, the impact on the Dutch East Indies (as Indonesia was known 90 years ago) was much higher as well.
In the United States, perhaps 1 person in 150 died (not everyone was infected). Based on this retelling, as many as 1 person in 20 died in Indonesia.
I've only included the opening paragraphs to Emmy's article. Follow the link to read it in its entirety.
Thursday, January 22, 2009 7:17 PM
Our nearly forgotten pandemic
Emmy Fitri and Arie Rukmantara , JAKARTA |
Thu, 01/22/2009 4:35 PM | Opinion
"Influenza pandemic" is a household term in Indonesia, yet, all too often, the problem seems foreign to us because when we talk about flu pandemics we usually refer to incidents that happened on the other side of the world.
One of the most widely cited examples is the 1918 flu pandemic, which is considered the worst plague in world history because of its massive death toll and extensive spread. Around 30 million people were killed in the pandemic - also known as the Spanish Flu - mostly in America, Europe and Africa.
Little do we know that our great-great grandparents fought in the same battle.
Alex Crosby (America's Forgotten Pandemic), John M. Barry (The Great Influenza) and Gina Kolata (Flu) along with scores of scientific papers on the 1918 pandemic have detailed how the epidemic struck, killed more people than World War I and disrupted health services.
But none of these works mention what happened here in Indonesia. Thus, psychologically, it is hard to relate to, as we get the impression that pandemic-prevention talks are simply fear mongering, a far-flung threat to our comfort. Historical records of the Dutch colonial administration show that our ancestors did not escape the havoc of the 1918 flu.
In the 1980s, Collin Brown, an Australian historian, published a paper titled The Influenza Pandemic of 1918 in Indonesia, which gives us an idea of what happened during the period. Around 1.5 million people died in Dutch East Indies, which was then home to just some 30 million people.
(Continue . . . )
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