Sunday, May 11, 2025
5/11/2025
Sickness and Power: The Great North American Epizootic Flu of 1872 - Project Summary The recent outbreak of COVID-19 and the upswing in seasonal influenza this winter offer pressing reminders of the enduring, even intensifying dangers that emergent zoonotic diseases— disorders caused by pathogens that jump across species divides—pose to human health. Historians of medicine and other scholars have long recognized the power of such diseases to shape human history. Yet few works in epidemiological history have attended to the complicated relationships that continue to link pathogens, humans, other-than-human animals, and the natural and built ecosystems that connect the lives—and, often, the deaths—of these disparate organisms. This proposal seeks to remedy this gap by supporting the completion of a Geographic Information System (GIS) and scholarly book examining the Great Epizootic Influenza of 1872. This little-known disease event began in Toronto’s market-farming hinterland, where the continuous exchange of pathogens between humans, horses, other farm animals, and wild waterfowl set the stage for the evolution of a new and unprecedentedly virulent form of influenza A virus. Within weeks, swarms of the new virus had engulfed metropolitan Toronto. It took just another month for the disease to spread throughout southeastern Canada and the northeastern U.S. By summer 1873, flu had sickened well over 90% of the horses, mules, and asses in the U.S., Canada, Cuba, Mexico, the Indigenous Nations of the West, and parts of Central America. As it achieved continental proportions, the Great Epizootic prompted economic paralysis, debate about the malady’s nature and treatment, and more than a little soul-searching over human use and misuse of “the noble horse.” Although the disease seemed to dissipate in fall 1873, recent scientific studies strongly suggest that the new flu type responsible for the Great Epizootic lived on and continued to adapt. Descendants of this viral type went on to develop the ability to infect human populations, too, most notably in the Great Pandemic of 1918-’20, a worldwide influenza outbreak that killed at least 50 million people. This proposal supports research in historical documents, the integration of evidence from these primary sources into a Geographic Information System (GIS), and the completion of a scholarly book that casts the Great Epizootic Flu as an unheralded but momentous event in disease history. Employing methodologies and findings from virology, evolutionary ecology, animal behavior, environmental history, and other fields, and adopting a transnational perspective that tracks this outbreak across regional, national, and tribal boundaries, this book offers fresh insights into the past, present, and future of influenza and the many other infectious diseases that don novel configurations—and hence new powers to endanger human and animal health alike—by passing from species to species.
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