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Iām just really fascinated that this parrot fever out break happened just after our last big pandemic. And that because of this the National Institute Of Health was formed!
That one of the investigators doctors became sick, and because they didnāt have antibiotics had to be treated with an early human antibody serum from a donor....
ā Just 10 years after the end to the horrific Spanish flu pandemic, which claimed more than 600,000 American lives (and tens of millions worldwide), a new and mysterious pneumonia began to spread in the northeast.
It began when Simon Martin, a worker at the Chamber of Commerce in Annapolis, Maryland bought a parrot for his wife Lillian 10 days before Christmas.
Hoping to keep it a surprise, he enlisted his daughter (Edith) and son-in-law (Lee) to keep the bird until Christmas day, but by Christmas Eve, the bird began to show signs of illness.
By morning, in a scene reminiscent of a Monty Python sketch, they had a late parrot on their hands.
Unfortunately, by New Years, Lillian, Edith & Lee were all seriously ill. A local doctor, who had read about a parrot fever outbreak in South America, put the pieces together about a week later.
In no time, newspapers had the story, and the country ā still reeling from the Stock Market crash of October ā and with memories of the 1918 Spanish Flu still relatively fresh ā suddenly began to fear a new pandemic was on the way.
ā After a week of screaming headlines, the newspapers did an about-face and began to ridicule the story ā even going so as to begin printing parrot jokes. Overnight the Polly Pandemic became a national joke.
But the investigative work continued.
Within a week, the story would take horrific turn, as a number of the investigators began to fall seriously ill.
Several of them died.
On February 8th, lead investigator Charles Armstrong was admitted to the hospital with a 104 degree fever. George McCoy, director of the US Public Health Servicesā very small and underfunded Hygienic lab, took over and in a daring move created a serum (this was before antibiotics were available) from the blood of a recovered patient, which he gave to Armstrong.
Armstrong would recover, and eventually wrote that there had been 169 cases of parrot fever nationwide, along with 33 deaths (including Dr. Daniel S. Hatfield and Dr. William Stokes of the Baltimore Health Department, and Henry (Shorty) Anderson of the Hygienic Lab) ā
https://afludiary.blogspot.com/2012/03/how-parrot-fever-changed-public-health.html
That one of the investigators doctors became sick, and because they didnāt have antibiotics had to be treated with an early human antibody serum from a donor....
ā Just 10 years after the end to the horrific Spanish flu pandemic, which claimed more than 600,000 American lives (and tens of millions worldwide), a new and mysterious pneumonia began to spread in the northeast.
It began when Simon Martin, a worker at the Chamber of Commerce in Annapolis, Maryland bought a parrot for his wife Lillian 10 days before Christmas.
Hoping to keep it a surprise, he enlisted his daughter (Edith) and son-in-law (Lee) to keep the bird until Christmas day, but by Christmas Eve, the bird began to show signs of illness.
By morning, in a scene reminiscent of a Monty Python sketch, they had a late parrot on their hands.
Unfortunately, by New Years, Lillian, Edith & Lee were all seriously ill. A local doctor, who had read about a parrot fever outbreak in South America, put the pieces together about a week later.
In no time, newspapers had the story, and the country ā still reeling from the Stock Market crash of October ā and with memories of the 1918 Spanish Flu still relatively fresh ā suddenly began to fear a new pandemic was on the way.
ā After a week of screaming headlines, the newspapers did an about-face and began to ridicule the story ā even going so as to begin printing parrot jokes. Overnight the Polly Pandemic became a national joke.
But the investigative work continued.
Within a week, the story would take horrific turn, as a number of the investigators began to fall seriously ill.
Several of them died.
On February 8th, lead investigator Charles Armstrong was admitted to the hospital with a 104 degree fever. George McCoy, director of the US Public Health Servicesā very small and underfunded Hygienic lab, took over and in a daring move created a serum (this was before antibiotics were available) from the blood of a recovered patient, which he gave to Armstrong.
Armstrong would recover, and eventually wrote that there had been 169 cases of parrot fever nationwide, along with 33 deaths (including Dr. Daniel S. Hatfield and Dr. William Stokes of the Baltimore Health Department, and Henry (Shorty) Anderson of the Hygienic Lab) ā
https://afludiary.blogspot.com/2012/03/how-parrot-fever-changed-public-health.html
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