March 12, 2025 • 30 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Today, getting the flu (for most people) means a few days on the couch—or in the worst case—a visit to the hospital. In 1918, however, it was a potential death sentence, and the treatments might have been even worse. Dr. Jeremy Brown, author of Influenza: The Hundred-Year Hunt to Cure the Deadliest Disease in History, tells the story at the U.S. National Archives back in 2019 of how we went from bloodletting—to a few days in bed.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we return to our American stories. And we love
telling stories about American innovation on this show, especially stories
about medical innovation. How we got from blood letting to
blood transfusions and beyond. Up next, the story of the flu.
You've had it, I've had it, We've all had it.
But how did we go from influenza being a potential
(00:32):
death sentence we knew nothing about to a day or two.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
On the sofa.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
You to tell that story is er doctor doctor Jeremy Brown.
Doctor Brown is also the author of Influenza one hundred
Year Hunt to Cure the deadliest disease in history. We'd
like to thank the US National Archives for allowing us
to access this audio from doctor Brown's lecture in twenty nineteen.
(00:58):
Let's get into the story.
Speaker 3 (01:00):
More people were killed in the influenza virus than in
the wars, fifty to one hundred million people worldwide. Here
in the United States six hundred and seventy five thousand
deaths civilian deaths, and of the one hundred and sixteen thousand
combat casualties killed in World War One, over half actually
(01:20):
died from disease. The majority of that was influenza. It's
a sobering thought to think that if you take those
statistics and multiply them out by the current population of
the United States, those six hundred and seventy five thousand
deaths would turn out to be about three million deaths
in today's numbers. The nineteen eighteen Great flu Epidemic caused
(01:41):
such a large loss of life that it dropped the
average life expectancy in the US by twelve years twelve years,
one hundred and twenty times greater than what we have
seen with the current opioid crisis. So put that into
perspective and think what that would be like to live
through such a thing. So this is the Washington Post
(02:03):
from Saturday, September fourteenth, and nineteen eighteen. It's not the
front page, and it tells us that the Spanish influenza
was spreading across the US. Wasn't really reported yet in
the papers in large numbers, but it had begun to
spread across the US.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
Now.
Speaker 3 (02:21):
The following day, the Washington Post reported that ninety people
had died of influenza in Boston and that the malady
seemed to have been sweeping from east to west. It
wasn't actually it was actually probably started somewhere in the Midwest,
but the malady was already sort of ramping up, and
the very next day they reported that ninety people in
(02:43):
Boston had died. These were deaths amongst soldiers and sailors.
The plague builds momentum, more and more people die, and
by October second, on the front page of the Washington Post,
we were told that the work hours have changed, that
the federal day has been staggered to check the influenza's bread.
The idea was that if we could stop people from mingling.
(03:03):
Although we didn't know that it was a virus that
was causing this, we did understand somehow that keeping away
from people was probably a good idea. So theaters were
closed down in some places, restaurants either closed or staggered.
Stores had staggered hours. By October thirteenth, nineteen eighteen, the
Washington Post reported that the price of coffins had skyrocketed
(03:25):
and that this was an example of people taking advantage
of a terrible situation. In fact, they write, the coffin
trust is holding the people of this city of Washington,
holding the people of this city by the throat, and
extorting from them outrageous prices. For coffins and disposal of
the dead. By December the eighth of nineteen eighteen, the
(03:46):
Washington Post had thought that we were coming to an end,
and it put this this little snippet that said that
Spanish influenza is more deadly than war, and that is
indeed the case.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
We know that.
Speaker 3 (04:00):
The treatments were not terribly effective. They included mercury tree
bark inhaling factory gases. Yes, that actually happened. People were
reported in the south of England to be taking their
families and their children to local gas works actually munition factories,
where the toxic fumes were thought to somehow reduce the
(04:21):
likelihood of getting influenza. Actually, this turns out not to
be as crazy as it sounds, because many of these
gasworks actually contained chlorine. Chlorine gas was used during the war,
and we know that chlorine is a great antiseptic. It
kills everything, including people, so very likely the chlorine in fact,
and some work that was done showed that factory workers
(04:41):
in these places had influenza at slightly lower rates than
other people, probably because yes, they were inhaling little bits
of chlorine and the whole atmosphere was bathed in the
chlorine gas, and that probably reduced the amount of free
virus floating around, so it wasn't a completely crazy thing
to take your children to inhale factory gases.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
There were some upsides of treatment back then.
Speaker 3 (05:03):
Whiskey was extremely popular, as was champagne. Enemas were used.
Enemas actually we used to treat everything.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
Back then.
Speaker 3 (05:11):
There was really very little you could do, so an
enema was thought to be clean everything out. So animals
were quite quite popular. And one of the most remarkable
things is blood letting. Now, blood letting is the process
by which blood is removed from the body, and the
thought is that with that removal of the blood, you
(05:32):
are taking out the bad humor, the bad thing that
is in the blood causing the disease. It dates back
to at least the fifth century BC, and George Washington
was probably killed by blood letting. As he laid dying
from a throat infection, his senior doctors suggested that we
let blood. Now, the junior people were less into this idea,
(05:54):
and there was a little bit of resistance from them,
but no as usual, the senior people won and blood
was taken from George Washington as he lay dying on
his bed, and he passed out or entered a swoon,
and it was called then, and within a few hours
he was dead. The doctors then tried to think about
reanimating George Washington by using and I'm not making this up,
(06:15):
sheep's blood at that time. Though, fortunately good sense prevailed
and they decided enough is enough with the blood letting
and the sheep's blood, and they let him rest in peace.
But what is remarkable to me is that blood letting
was used in the Great flu epidemic of nineteen eighteen,
and not just by what we might call quacks today,
(06:35):
but this was prescribed by mainstream physicians. There's a report
in the Lancet, one of the leading medical journals in
the world, one of the leading medical journals in the
United Kingdom. And if you think about it, the name
the Lancet is named after the device, the little hollow
tube that you would take blood from. So leading medical
journal today is called the Lancet to remind us of
(06:56):
blood letting. And the report mentions that in nineteen six
that's two years before this Great flu pandemic, there was
another pandemic, another epidemic, excuse me, in some of the
military camps in Great Britain, and the doctors had tried everything, including,
they said, including blood letting. So it was nineteen sixteen.
Now this is the lifetime of my own grandfather. In
(07:18):
nineteen sixteen, physicians were trying blood letting on these poor patients,
and of course it didn't work. But the physician said
it didn't work. But we think that it didn't work
because we tried it too late, and had we tried
blood letting a little bit sooner in the clinical care
of these soldiers, that maybe it worked. And then there
(07:39):
were reports in nineteen eighteen, the height of the epidemic
of blood letting, and in fact the reports were that yes,
sometimes blood letting works for influenza. So you can see
if it wasn't the enemies that got you, the blood
letting might get you. And it was really quite a
nasty array of medicines that we had to try and
treat this. Everyone was prescribed enemas.
Speaker 2 (08:02):
And one of my.
Speaker 3 (08:03):
Favorite discoveries was from a published paper from I think
the grand the grandchildren of a patient who had influenza,
not in nineteen eighteen, but in nineteen thirty six, almost
two decades after the Great influenza pandemic. The family had
preserved the nursing records of grandfather, found them in the
attic and actually published them. And I'm going to read
(08:25):
a little bit a passage that describes what this person
went through. So over a period of three weeks, he
was treated with a punishing battery of balms, mustard plaster,
a home remedy rubbed on the skin, aspirin for fevers,
codeine for cough, phenotheoline a cancer causing laxative cough, medicine,
(08:47):
camphorated oil, seven enemas, seven rectal tubes, don't ask, milk
of magnesia, another laxative, God help him, eurotropine, a bladder antiseptic,
and tincture of benzoin. These were all administered to this
patient in nineteen thirty six, And actually in the paper
that was published you can see the arrows along the
(09:09):
timeline where all these various things were given. The patient
received at least five prescribed doses of whiskey, so there
is at least that and fourteen doses of castor oil. Actually,
his seven enemies may have been medically necessary because he
was given at least thirty nine doses of codeine, which
(09:30):
suppresses coughing but also causes constipation. So that's what life
was like when you had influenza one hundred years ago
or so.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
And if you were cringing, we're cringing listening. Animas were
de rigor. Blood letting was just what you did. When
we come back the Influenza of nineteen eighteen, the Great Flu,
the story continues here on our American stories, and we
(10:09):
return to our American stories and with doctor Jeremy Brown's
lecture at the US National Archives back in twenty nineteen
about influenza. The flu. In nineteen eighteen, we knew nothing
about the flu, what caused it, or how to cure it,
or how to effectively alleviate the disease at all. Countless
died six hundred and seventy five thousand in America alone,
(10:32):
the equivalent of three million today. Let's pick up where
we last left off.
Speaker 2 (10:38):
What about today? How do we do today? Well?
Speaker 3 (10:42):
For the vast majority of us, the vast majority of US,
influenza is a little bit of an inconvenience. It's not
life threatening, and it's something that we generally deal with
at home. Our friends or our family come around, give
us some hot soup, a couple of days in bed,
and usually that's it. But of course some of us
(11:03):
end up in the emergency department. And over my time
as an emergency physician, I got to treat many, many,
possibly hundreds, who knows, maybe thousands of patients with influenza
over the many years. And there we have things that
we didn't have one hundred years ago. Right, we have
an emergency department, blood tests that can tell us what's happening,
X rays so that we can actually get a real
(11:24):
good look at the lungs and see if there's any
evidence of secondary pneumonia or even primary pneumonia. We can
get people intravenous fluids, and of course we have antibiotics today. Now,
let's be very clear, antibiotics should not be given to
patients with influenza. They do not work.
Speaker 2 (11:43):
We all know this.
Speaker 3 (11:44):
Even though they're prescribed unnecessarily often even today, they don't work.
But they do work to help treat the secondary infections,
the pneumonias, the bacterial pneumonias that come as a result
of the primary viral influenza. And we have those antibiotics today.
It's a remarkable thing that today we believe that the
(12:05):
majority of deaths that occurred in the Great flu Epidemic
were caused by secondary pneumonias that we would be able
to treat today.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
So that's good news.
Speaker 3 (12:15):
Enema's blood letting whiskey one hundred years ago. Today the
emergency department will stay at home. And of course connected
to the emergency department is the intensive care unit. I mean,
that's the miracle of modern medicine today that clearly was
not around one hundred years ago.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
So the treatment.
Speaker 3 (12:33):
Let's now think about the cause of influenza. What do
we know about the cause today and what did they
know one hundred years ago? So I think in many
respects this is the most frightening aspect of the Great
Influenza pandemic that they just didn't know what it was
caused by now, there were some suggestions. Among those suggestions
(12:55):
included the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, in fact, the
conjunct of the planets. In fact, that's where we get
the name influenza from. It's from the Italian influentzia, meaning influence.
And the earliest thoughts were in the fifteen sixteen hundreds,
well that this disease and it was an entity that
you could identify this disease was caused by something up
(13:16):
in the stars. So there was this theory going around,
and we still have this buried in our history when
we refer to influenza today. So perhaps conjunction of Jupiter
and satin rotting animal carcasses were thought to be one
possible explanation earthquakes and volcanic eruptions effluvia of that word,
effluvia discharged into the air from the bowels of the earth.
(13:41):
People really didn't know what it was. In fact, at
a meeting that occurred in Chicago public health officials early
in the influenza epidemic of nineteen eighteen one, public health
officials said the following, we may as well admit it
and call it germ X. We have no idea, said
the reading public health officials. We don't know what causes
(14:02):
it and where we are now. An example of a
cause that was really not a cause was a discovery
in eighteen ninety two in Berlin by some microbiologists, and
they found a bacterium on the lung samples of people
who had died from the flu. And they said, Aha,
this must be the cause of the flu, because it's
everywhere right, and they called this bacterium. They called it
(14:24):
Bacillus influenza, the influenza bacillus. The problem was that it
was not the cause of the disease. It was a
secondary pathogen that was found. It was a secondary bacteria.
And that thought that they found that the bacteria and
it turned out not to be correct. That happened several
in several different instances in the history of flu. The
(14:47):
bacillus was later changed its name and it was called
not Basillis influenza, but Himophilus influenza. And some of you
may have heard of Hymophalus influenza. It's a nasty bug.
But for many years I had no idea as a physician,
Why am I looking or treating this person with what
we call h flu.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
This has nothing to do with the flu.
Speaker 3 (15:08):
Well, it turns out that one hundred years ago it
was thought to have been the cause of the flu,
and it was inappropriately named. One of the historians, Alfred Crosby,
one of the historians of the Great Flu, called this
discovery of Basillis influenza an authoritative sign pointing in the
wrong direction. So, yeah, that was Basillis influenza. Secondary pathogen. Now,
(15:32):
in eighteen eighty nine there had been there had been
a small epidemic, but the phili severe one in Great Britain,
and it was so severe that actually Parliament commissioned a
report on the epidemic, and this was reported in eighteen
eighty nine by Henry Parsons. Henry Parsons, and he was
a very very smart person, and we'll see why. He
(15:52):
spoke about various theories that may have caused this eighteen
eighty nine epidemic. One of the theories that time, and
I'm not making this up, was tainted Russian oats. The
suggestion was that the Russians were bringing their disease from
the East through Europe in these tainted Russian oats. Now,
(16:13):
every society actually blamed the outsider for this, but it
strikes me as kind of weird that today when we're
still blaming the Russians for pretty much everything. Back in
the Great flu Epidemic and earlier, perhaps the Russians were
behind it as well. But Parsons, as I said, was
smarter than that, and he dug a little deeper. So
he suggested, he said, well, it could be the weather.
(16:34):
Perhaps there's something floating around in the air, and that is,
of course partially true. There is something in the air,
although it's person to person contact. More and he suggested
that maybe it's a non living particulate matter, which is
actually a remarkably accurate description, isn't it of what a
virus turned out to be a non living particulate matter.
(16:57):
So it was a little prescient there in describing the.
Speaker 2 (17:01):
Possible cause of the flu.
Speaker 3 (17:02):
So it could be Russian tainted oats, it could be
a poison in mid air. Then he suggested, well, what
if it's a person to person contact. It's not spread
by oats or volcanoes or stuff in the air, but
one person gives it to another. And here I think
Henry Parsons really showed the right way for us to
think about things. He said, let's get some data if
(17:22):
it's person to person contact. So what he did was
he looked at the illness rates on the British railway
system and he compared the rates of the engineers who
were feeding the steam engines the coal who worked outside
but far away from people, and he compared those influenza
rates how many people reported sick from that group of workers.
(17:45):
He compared those to the rates of influenza among the
clerks inside who were selling the tickets, and of course
they are inside, so they're not exposed to the outside,
but they're in constant contact with people. And he simply
compared the two and he found that, of course it
was the clerks who had an increased rate of influenza
(18:05):
illness because they were in contact with people, and the
railway engineers driving the train standing outside feeding the coal
into that big steam engine, their rates of flu were
really much lower than the clerks, even though they were
outside exposed to the effluvia and who knows what from volcanoes.
And from here he suggested that it's really probably nothing
(18:27):
to do with the atmosphere, but it's more to do
with person to person contact. So from a simple look
at some records, this guy Parsons figured out that probably
we're onto something in the person to person sphere.
Speaker 2 (18:39):
And then he said the following.
Speaker 3 (18:41):
He also suggested that perhaps animals have something to do
with it, and here he was really on the money.
He suggested that perhaps birds or horses or dogs had
something to do with the spread. And he goes into
this in some detail in his report, and of course
we know today that birds are intimately related to the
spread of influenza and new strains. So back in eighteen
(19:04):
eighty nine, Henry Parsons, I think was really onto something
when he discussed the possibility that birds were involved.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
A man ahead of his time, Henry Parson. When we
come back more of the story of the influenza, the
flu here on our American stories, and we returned to
(19:39):
our American stories and the final portion of our story
featuring doctor Jeremy Brown from a lecture at the US
National Archives back in twenty nineteen about influenza the flu
Let's pick up where we last left off.
Speaker 3 (19:54):
Now today, of course, we know what causes influenza. There
is no doubt. It's a viral particle many many times
smaller than a bacterium. We're able to take photo micrographs
of this when the electron microscope was developed and able
to be used around eighteen thirty nine. In fact, scientists
today know that the genetic code of the influenza virus,
(20:17):
how it's eight viral genes work together, what its viral
code looks like, the proteins on that viral code, what
those proteins do, and how they make us sick and
So the degree of advances I think from this suggestion
that it's something in oats to something that we can
see and identify and know a lot about is really,
(20:39):
I think a remarkable example of the progression of science.
Now we can identify the viral particle down to its
genetic makeup, its genetic construction. So in that respect, I
think we've come a long way in understanding the cause,
the cause of the disease, which brings us to the
last part now, which is the way that we've changed
(21:02):
in terms of prevention. So there were attempts to produce
early vaccines to influenza. Now, Louis Pasteur back in the
eighteen eighties had of course developed his own set of vaccines,
most famously to rabies. And that doesn't necessarily mean that
he knew what the virus was, but he had a
suggestion that it was something that was in the nervous tissue,
(21:23):
and he managed to propagate nervous tissue and take samples
and make them weaker and weaker and weaker, until he
figured out that what he had now was a weakened
thing he called a virus, and that's how he produces
rabies vaccines. So we know that people were producing vaccines
back then, but of course what they were using were
bacteria that was secondary pathogens and not the primary pathogen,
(21:46):
which was influenza. So, for instance, in early nineteen and nineteen,
Edward Rossino from the Mayo Clinic isolated five different kinds
of bacteria from patients and he mixed them all together
and he managed to inoculate over one hundred thousand people
with his vaccine. We're not sure what the clinical outcomes were,
and the records aren't great, but he certainly tried. Now
(22:09):
in Boston at the Tufts Medical College, Dr Timothy Leary
made a vaccine. Now, he made a blended vaccine using
the strains from the Chelsea Hospital, Chelsea Naval Hospital, a
nurse's nose from the Carney Hospital, and the infected wards
of Camp Devons, not far from Boston, and he made
(22:29):
a concoction and gave them to people. And actually his
vaccine ended up being sent to San Francisco, where eighteen
thousand people were inoculated with his vaccine. So that's Dr
Timothy Leary. And in case you're wondering, yes, the answer
is it is the same Dr Timothy Leary. In fact,
this is the uncle of the famous Dr Timothy Leary
(22:51):
in Boston. He who wanted us to turn on, tune in,
and drop out. It's his uncle who created this atten
at a vaccine one hundred years ago. So that's attempts
at vaccines back then.
Speaker 2 (23:04):
What do we do today? What do we have today?
Speaker 3 (23:07):
Well, we do have vaccines against the flu, but it's
really not a very good vaccine. I mean, if you
think about it, right, mumps, measles, rebella, polio, you get
them once or twice as a kid, and you're done. Right,
You're done, you finished, that's it. You're good to go.
You won't get the disease ever. But in terms of flu,
(23:28):
we're told that we need to get it every year,
a new flu shot. I just had it last year
and the year before. We're dealing with a vaccine that
is really not on the same level of effectiveness as
these others. In fact, in a good year, in a
good year with the wind blowing in the right direction,
the flu vaccine is about fifty to sixty percent effective
(23:49):
at best at best, So why is this right? Why
is this flu vaccine so hard to create? And the
answer is that we have this hollow ball that contains
the eight genes of the flu virus, and it makes
these proteins on the surface, and it's against those proteins
the vaccine is created. The problem is that flu is
such a good disguise, at a master of disguise, that
(24:12):
it changes the makeup of those surface proteins very very quickly,
and it mutates from one kind to another, so that
when we think we've got we figured out what kind
of flu is going to be around with species A,
well it turns out the species A then sort of
mutates and the vaccine is no longer effective against species A.
Oh and by the way, we didn't realize that species
B and C were actually going to be the ones,
(24:34):
so we didn't include those in the vaccine, and therefore
we weren't You weren't at vaccinated against those, which is
the reason, incidentally, by the reason that some of us
get the flu vaccine and we end up with the flu, right,
it's because not because the vaccine didn't work against that
particular strain, but because there were either other strains that
(24:54):
we weren't vaccinated against, or because the original strain changed
its surface structure just that bit, so that there's like
changing an overcoat from a brown overcoat to a black overcoat,
and the immune system didn't recognize it. And that's what's
going on with the flu vaccine. It stays one step
ahead of us.
Speaker 2 (25:12):
All the time. And it's a similar story with HIV.
Speaker 3 (25:16):
Right the promise of an HIV vaccine was we'd have
it within a year or two, so we were told.
Speaker 2 (25:21):
In nineteen eighty. Still not there.
Speaker 3 (25:23):
These viruses are very clever at changing their surface and
at hiding from the immune system, and so we still
don't have a good influenza vaccine. The way we make
the vaccine, incidentally, is we have about one hundred and
twenty or so laboratories across the world. They look at
samples that are sent to their lab and try and
figure out exactly the kind.
Speaker 2 (25:44):
Of flu a species that is prevalent.
Speaker 3 (25:48):
We look at Australia and what they had in their
most recent influenza outbreak, because it's there, you know, in
their winter as our summer, and we try and figure
that out, and incidentally they do the same for us
that they look at to see what happened in the
northern hemisphere and adjust themselves for the oncoming flu season
in the summer, and then doctors make the best educated
(26:10):
yes they can, and they say, well, based on the
evidence that we have, the most likely species are going
to be this and this and this, and we're going
to make the vaccine. And in to this day, the
majority of that much of the vaccine is produced using eggs.
The vaccine is very hard to grow, so it's actually
grown on eggs, which is the same thing that was
used a century ago.
Speaker 2 (26:29):
And so in many.
Speaker 3 (26:30):
Respects, we're really at the beginning of the fight here
against influenza by preventing it and creating a vaccine. Now,
while that that is all true, and it's not a
very effective vaccine, we must remember that in certain groups,
in certain age groups, it's extremely important to get the vaccine.
The high risk people, right, so those are children, the elderly,
(26:53):
those with immune compromised conditions, people who've been taking steroids
or may have undergone chemotherapy, pregnant women. Extremely important for
pregnant women to get the influenza vaccine. For some reason,
there are slightly more there are an increased risk of
complications from influenza, and so those are some of the
(27:16):
the high risk groups that should certainly be vaccinated. There's
no question there. In terms of everybody else, the data
out there is harder to to to really find an
effect on the flu. In fact, for instance, in the
United Kingdom, those high risk groups are targeted and everybody
else can sort of well, if you want one, you
can get one, go talk to your primary care doctor.
(27:37):
But there's no campaign. Right here in the US, we
have a campaign the CDC says everybody over the age
of six months should get vaccinated.
Speaker 2 (27:45):
Period.
Speaker 3 (27:46):
That is, that is the advice that we're given here
in the United States. It's just worth pointing out that
this is not the advice that is given overseas.
Speaker 2 (27:53):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (27:54):
And we can talk about why that might be another time,
but it's it's it's it's a bit. It's an important difference,
I think in the way we think about the flu.
So for high risk groups, it's very important. For healthy
otherwise healthy adults, the evidence is that influenza vaccine doesn't
really do a whole lot.
Speaker 2 (28:12):
We're still not there yet.
Speaker 3 (28:14):
So if we look at where we were one hundred
years ago and where we are today, the treatments are
very different, thankfully, but we still lack real good treatments
for influenza we understand the virus in in a remarkable
and deep and profound way, in a way that was
unimaginable a century ago. So my hope then, looking forward
(28:34):
is that we really will be able to see influenza
is not just a story of the past, but as
a disease of the past, in the way that we
think about smallpox as a disease of the past, a
disease that was eradicated.
Speaker 2 (28:47):
Thank you for your time and a.
Speaker 1 (28:49):
Terrific job on the production, editing and storytelling by ourn
Monty Montgomery, And a special thanks to the US National
Archives for allowing us to access this audio from doctor
Jeremy Brown's lecture there in twenty nineteen. Doctor Jeremy Brown
is the author of Influenza, The one hundred Year Hunt
to Cure the Deadliest Disease in History. My goodness that
(29:13):
stat he used early on in the storytelling that in
nineteen eighteen, because of the massive casualties in the United States,
the equivalent of three million today, life expectancy in the
United States dropped twelve years in one year. And we
still don't know enough about influenza and how to cure it.
(29:35):
But we know a lot more than we used to,
from thinking it came from oats, to knowing deep and
particular things about this disease and knowing its genetic makeup,
even even down to the nature of the viral particles
it consists of. The flu, though, is complex, we learn,
and it's ever changing and morphing. Like AIDS itself. These
(29:59):
two are tough to just get. They morph, they change,
They hide the story of the flu. The story is
so much more where technology and scientific and medical innovation was,
Where it is where it needs to go. Here on
our American stories
And we return to our American stories. And we love
telling stories about American innovation on this show, especially stories
about medical innovation. How we got from blood letting to
blood transfusions and beyond. Up next, the story of the flu.
You've had it, I've had it, We've all had it.
But how did we go from influenza being a potential
(00:32):
death sentence we knew nothing about to a day or two.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
On the sofa.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
You to tell that story is er doctor doctor Jeremy Brown.
Doctor Brown is also the author of Influenza one hundred
Year Hunt to Cure the deadliest disease in history. We'd
like to thank the US National Archives for allowing us
to access this audio from doctor Brown's lecture in twenty nineteen.
(00:58):
Let's get into the story.
Speaker 3 (01:00):
More people were killed in the influenza virus than in
the wars, fifty to one hundred million people worldwide. Here
in the United States six hundred and seventy five thousand
deaths civilian deaths, and of the one hundred and sixteen thousand
combat casualties killed in World War One, over half actually
(01:20):
died from disease. The majority of that was influenza. It's
a sobering thought to think that if you take those
statistics and multiply them out by the current population of
the United States, those six hundred and seventy five thousand
deaths would turn out to be about three million deaths
in today's numbers. The nineteen eighteen Great flu Epidemic caused
(01:41):
such a large loss of life that it dropped the
average life expectancy in the US by twelve years twelve years,
one hundred and twenty times greater than what we have
seen with the current opioid crisis. So put that into
perspective and think what that would be like to live
through such a thing. So this is the Washington Post
(02:03):
from Saturday, September fourteenth, and nineteen eighteen. It's not the
front page, and it tells us that the Spanish influenza
was spreading across the US. Wasn't really reported yet in
the papers in large numbers, but it had begun to
spread across the US.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
Now.
Speaker 3 (02:21):
The following day, the Washington Post reported that ninety people
had died of influenza in Boston and that the malady
seemed to have been sweeping from east to west. It
wasn't actually it was actually probably started somewhere in the Midwest,
but the malady was already sort of ramping up, and
the very next day they reported that ninety people in
(02:43):
Boston had died. These were deaths amongst soldiers and sailors.
The plague builds momentum, more and more people die, and
by October second, on the front page of the Washington Post,
we were told that the work hours have changed, that
the federal day has been staggered to check the influenza's bread.
The idea was that if we could stop people from mingling.
(03:03):
Although we didn't know that it was a virus that
was causing this, we did understand somehow that keeping away
from people was probably a good idea. So theaters were
closed down in some places, restaurants either closed or staggered.
Stores had staggered hours. By October thirteenth, nineteen eighteen, the
Washington Post reported that the price of coffins had skyrocketed
(03:25):
and that this was an example of people taking advantage
of a terrible situation. In fact, they write, the coffin
trust is holding the people of this city of Washington,
holding the people of this city by the throat, and
extorting from them outrageous prices. For coffins and disposal of
the dead. By December the eighth of nineteen eighteen, the
(03:46):
Washington Post had thought that we were coming to an end,
and it put this this little snippet that said that
Spanish influenza is more deadly than war, and that is
indeed the case.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
We know that.
Speaker 3 (04:00):
The treatments were not terribly effective. They included mercury tree
bark inhaling factory gases. Yes, that actually happened. People were
reported in the south of England to be taking their
families and their children to local gas works actually munition factories,
where the toxic fumes were thought to somehow reduce the
(04:21):
likelihood of getting influenza. Actually, this turns out not to
be as crazy as it sounds, because many of these
gasworks actually contained chlorine. Chlorine gas was used during the war,
and we know that chlorine is a great antiseptic. It
kills everything, including people, so very likely the chlorine in fact,
and some work that was done showed that factory workers
(04:41):
in these places had influenza at slightly lower rates than
other people, probably because yes, they were inhaling little bits
of chlorine and the whole atmosphere was bathed in the
chlorine gas, and that probably reduced the amount of free
virus floating around, so it wasn't a completely crazy thing
to take your children to inhale factory gases.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
There were some upsides of treatment back then.
Speaker 3 (05:03):
Whiskey was extremely popular, as was champagne. Enemas were used.
Enemas actually we used to treat everything.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
Back then.
Speaker 3 (05:11):
There was really very little you could do, so an
enema was thought to be clean everything out. So animals
were quite quite popular. And one of the most remarkable
things is blood letting. Now, blood letting is the process
by which blood is removed from the body, and the
thought is that with that removal of the blood, you
(05:32):
are taking out the bad humor, the bad thing that
is in the blood causing the disease. It dates back
to at least the fifth century BC, and George Washington
was probably killed by blood letting. As he laid dying
from a throat infection, his senior doctors suggested that we
let blood. Now, the junior people were less into this idea,
(05:54):
and there was a little bit of resistance from them,
but no as usual, the senior people won and blood
was taken from George Washington as he lay dying on
his bed, and he passed out or entered a swoon,
and it was called then, and within a few hours
he was dead. The doctors then tried to think about
reanimating George Washington by using and I'm not making this up,
(06:15):
sheep's blood at that time. Though, fortunately good sense prevailed
and they decided enough is enough with the blood letting
and the sheep's blood, and they let him rest in peace.
But what is remarkable to me is that blood letting
was used in the Great flu epidemic of nineteen eighteen,
and not just by what we might call quacks today,
(06:35):
but this was prescribed by mainstream physicians. There's a report
in the Lancet, one of the leading medical journals in
the world, one of the leading medical journals in the
United Kingdom. And if you think about it, the name
the Lancet is named after the device, the little hollow
tube that you would take blood from. So leading medical
journal today is called the Lancet to remind us of
(06:56):
blood letting. And the report mentions that in nineteen six
that's two years before this Great flu pandemic, there was
another pandemic, another epidemic, excuse me, in some of the
military camps in Great Britain, and the doctors had tried everything, including,
they said, including blood letting. So it was nineteen sixteen.
Now this is the lifetime of my own grandfather. In
(07:18):
nineteen sixteen, physicians were trying blood letting on these poor patients,
and of course it didn't work. But the physician said
it didn't work. But we think that it didn't work
because we tried it too late, and had we tried
blood letting a little bit sooner in the clinical care
of these soldiers, that maybe it worked. And then there
(07:39):
were reports in nineteen eighteen, the height of the epidemic
of blood letting, and in fact the reports were that yes,
sometimes blood letting works for influenza. So you can see
if it wasn't the enemies that got you, the blood
letting might get you. And it was really quite a
nasty array of medicines that we had to try and
treat this. Everyone was prescribed enemas.
Speaker 2 (08:02):
And one of my.
Speaker 3 (08:03):
Favorite discoveries was from a published paper from I think
the grand the grandchildren of a patient who had influenza,
not in nineteen eighteen, but in nineteen thirty six, almost
two decades after the Great influenza pandemic. The family had
preserved the nursing records of grandfather, found them in the
attic and actually published them. And I'm going to read
(08:25):
a little bit a passage that describes what this person
went through. So over a period of three weeks, he
was treated with a punishing battery of balms, mustard plaster,
a home remedy rubbed on the skin, aspirin for fevers,
codeine for cough, phenotheoline a cancer causing laxative cough, medicine,
(08:47):
camphorated oil, seven enemas, seven rectal tubes, don't ask, milk
of magnesia, another laxative, God help him, eurotropine, a bladder antiseptic,
and tincture of benzoin. These were all administered to this
patient in nineteen thirty six, And actually in the paper
that was published you can see the arrows along the
(09:09):
timeline where all these various things were given. The patient
received at least five prescribed doses of whiskey, so there
is at least that and fourteen doses of castor oil. Actually,
his seven enemies may have been medically necessary because he
was given at least thirty nine doses of codeine, which
(09:30):
suppresses coughing but also causes constipation. So that's what life
was like when you had influenza one hundred years ago
or so.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
And if you were cringing, we're cringing listening. Animas were
de rigor. Blood letting was just what you did. When
we come back the Influenza of nineteen eighteen, the Great Flu,
the story continues here on our American stories, and we
(10:09):
return to our American stories and with doctor Jeremy Brown's
lecture at the US National Archives back in twenty nineteen
about influenza. The flu. In nineteen eighteen, we knew nothing
about the flu, what caused it, or how to cure it,
or how to effectively alleviate the disease at all. Countless
died six hundred and seventy five thousand in America alone,
(10:32):
the equivalent of three million today. Let's pick up where
we last left off.
Speaker 2 (10:38):
What about today? How do we do today? Well?
Speaker 3 (10:42):
For the vast majority of us, the vast majority of US,
influenza is a little bit of an inconvenience. It's not
life threatening, and it's something that we generally deal with
at home. Our friends or our family come around, give
us some hot soup, a couple of days in bed,
and usually that's it. But of course some of us
(11:03):
end up in the emergency department. And over my time
as an emergency physician, I got to treat many, many,
possibly hundreds, who knows, maybe thousands of patients with influenza
over the many years. And there we have things that
we didn't have one hundred years ago. Right, we have
an emergency department, blood tests that can tell us what's happening,
X rays so that we can actually get a real
(11:24):
good look at the lungs and see if there's any
evidence of secondary pneumonia or even primary pneumonia. We can
get people intravenous fluids, and of course we have antibiotics today. Now,
let's be very clear, antibiotics should not be given to
patients with influenza. They do not work.
Speaker 2 (11:43):
We all know this.
Speaker 3 (11:44):
Even though they're prescribed unnecessarily often even today, they don't work.
But they do work to help treat the secondary infections,
the pneumonias, the bacterial pneumonias that come as a result
of the primary viral influenza. And we have those antibiotics today.
It's a remarkable thing that today we believe that the
(12:05):
majority of deaths that occurred in the Great flu Epidemic
were caused by secondary pneumonias that we would be able
to treat today.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
So that's good news.
Speaker 3 (12:15):
Enema's blood letting whiskey one hundred years ago. Today the
emergency department will stay at home. And of course connected
to the emergency department is the intensive care unit. I mean,
that's the miracle of modern medicine today that clearly was
not around one hundred years ago.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
So the treatment.
Speaker 3 (12:33):
Let's now think about the cause of influenza. What do
we know about the cause today and what did they
know one hundred years ago? So I think in many
respects this is the most frightening aspect of the Great
Influenza pandemic that they just didn't know what it was
caused by now, there were some suggestions. Among those suggestions
(12:55):
included the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, in fact, the
conjunct of the planets. In fact, that's where we get
the name influenza from. It's from the Italian influentzia, meaning influence.
And the earliest thoughts were in the fifteen sixteen hundreds,
well that this disease and it was an entity that
you could identify this disease was caused by something up
(13:16):
in the stars. So there was this theory going around,
and we still have this buried in our history when
we refer to influenza today. So perhaps conjunction of Jupiter
and satin rotting animal carcasses were thought to be one
possible explanation earthquakes and volcanic eruptions effluvia of that word,
effluvia discharged into the air from the bowels of the earth.
(13:41):
People really didn't know what it was. In fact, at
a meeting that occurred in Chicago public health officials early
in the influenza epidemic of nineteen eighteen one, public health
officials said the following, we may as well admit it
and call it germ X. We have no idea, said
the reading public health officials. We don't know what causes
(14:02):
it and where we are now. An example of a
cause that was really not a cause was a discovery
in eighteen ninety two in Berlin by some microbiologists, and
they found a bacterium on the lung samples of people
who had died from the flu. And they said, Aha,
this must be the cause of the flu, because it's
everywhere right, and they called this bacterium. They called it
(14:24):
Bacillus influenza, the influenza bacillus. The problem was that it
was not the cause of the disease. It was a
secondary pathogen that was found. It was a secondary bacteria.
And that thought that they found that the bacteria and
it turned out not to be correct. That happened several
in several different instances in the history of flu. The
(14:47):
bacillus was later changed its name and it was called
not Basillis influenza, but Himophilus influenza. And some of you
may have heard of Hymophalus influenza. It's a nasty bug.
But for many years I had no idea as a physician,
Why am I looking or treating this person with what
we call h flu.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
This has nothing to do with the flu.
Speaker 3 (15:08):
Well, it turns out that one hundred years ago it
was thought to have been the cause of the flu,
and it was inappropriately named. One of the historians, Alfred Crosby,
one of the historians of the Great Flu, called this
discovery of Basillis influenza an authoritative sign pointing in the
wrong direction. So, yeah, that was Basillis influenza. Secondary pathogen. Now,
(15:32):
in eighteen eighty nine there had been there had been
a small epidemic, but the phili severe one in Great Britain,
and it was so severe that actually Parliament commissioned a
report on the epidemic, and this was reported in eighteen
eighty nine by Henry Parsons. Henry Parsons, and he was
a very very smart person, and we'll see why. He
(15:52):
spoke about various theories that may have caused this eighteen
eighty nine epidemic. One of the theories that time, and
I'm not making this up, was tainted Russian oats. The
suggestion was that the Russians were bringing their disease from
the East through Europe in these tainted Russian oats. Now,
(16:13):
every society actually blamed the outsider for this, but it
strikes me as kind of weird that today when we're
still blaming the Russians for pretty much everything. Back in
the Great flu Epidemic and earlier, perhaps the Russians were
behind it as well. But Parsons, as I said, was
smarter than that, and he dug a little deeper. So
he suggested, he said, well, it could be the weather.
(16:34):
Perhaps there's something floating around in the air, and that is,
of course partially true. There is something in the air,
although it's person to person contact. More and he suggested
that maybe it's a non living particulate matter, which is
actually a remarkably accurate description, isn't it of what a
virus turned out to be a non living particulate matter.
(16:57):
So it was a little prescient there in describing the.
Speaker 2 (17:01):
Possible cause of the flu.
Speaker 3 (17:02):
So it could be Russian tainted oats, it could be
a poison in mid air. Then he suggested, well, what
if it's a person to person contact. It's not spread
by oats or volcanoes or stuff in the air, but
one person gives it to another. And here I think
Henry Parsons really showed the right way for us to
think about things. He said, let's get some data if
(17:22):
it's person to person contact. So what he did was
he looked at the illness rates on the British railway
system and he compared the rates of the engineers who
were feeding the steam engines the coal who worked outside
but far away from people, and he compared those influenza
rates how many people reported sick from that group of workers.
(17:45):
He compared those to the rates of influenza among the
clerks inside who were selling the tickets, and of course
they are inside, so they're not exposed to the outside,
but they're in constant contact with people. And he simply
compared the two and he found that, of course it
was the clerks who had an increased rate of influenza
(18:05):
illness because they were in contact with people, and the
railway engineers driving the train standing outside feeding the coal
into that big steam engine, their rates of flu were
really much lower than the clerks, even though they were
outside exposed to the effluvia and who knows what from volcanoes.
And from here he suggested that it's really probably nothing
(18:27):
to do with the atmosphere, but it's more to do
with person to person contact. So from a simple look
at some records, this guy Parsons figured out that probably
we're onto something in the person to person sphere.
Speaker 2 (18:39):
And then he said the following.
Speaker 3 (18:41):
He also suggested that perhaps animals have something to do
with it, and here he was really on the money.
He suggested that perhaps birds or horses or dogs had
something to do with the spread. And he goes into
this in some detail in his report, and of course
we know today that birds are intimately related to the
spread of influenza and new strains. So back in eighteen
(19:04):
eighty nine, Henry Parsons, I think was really onto something
when he discussed the possibility that birds were involved.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
A man ahead of his time, Henry Parson. When we
come back more of the story of the influenza, the
flu here on our American stories, and we returned to
(19:39):
our American stories and the final portion of our story
featuring doctor Jeremy Brown from a lecture at the US
National Archives back in twenty nineteen about influenza the flu
Let's pick up where we last left off.
Speaker 3 (19:54):
Now today, of course, we know what causes influenza. There
is no doubt. It's a viral particle many many times
smaller than a bacterium. We're able to take photo micrographs
of this when the electron microscope was developed and able
to be used around eighteen thirty nine. In fact, scientists
today know that the genetic code of the influenza virus,
(20:17):
how it's eight viral genes work together, what its viral
code looks like, the proteins on that viral code, what
those proteins do, and how they make us sick and
So the degree of advances I think from this suggestion
that it's something in oats to something that we can
see and identify and know a lot about is really,
(20:39):
I think a remarkable example of the progression of science.
Now we can identify the viral particle down to its
genetic makeup, its genetic construction. So in that respect, I
think we've come a long way in understanding the cause,
the cause of the disease, which brings us to the
last part now, which is the way that we've changed
(21:02):
in terms of prevention. So there were attempts to produce
early vaccines to influenza. Now, Louis Pasteur back in the
eighteen eighties had of course developed his own set of vaccines,
most famously to rabies. And that doesn't necessarily mean that
he knew what the virus was, but he had a
suggestion that it was something that was in the nervous tissue,
(21:23):
and he managed to propagate nervous tissue and take samples
and make them weaker and weaker and weaker, until he
figured out that what he had now was a weakened
thing he called a virus, and that's how he produces
rabies vaccines. So we know that people were producing vaccines
back then, but of course what they were using were
bacteria that was secondary pathogens and not the primary pathogen,
(21:46):
which was influenza. So, for instance, in early nineteen and nineteen,
Edward Rossino from the Mayo Clinic isolated five different kinds
of bacteria from patients and he mixed them all together
and he managed to inoculate over one hundred thousand people
with his vaccine. We're not sure what the clinical outcomes were,
and the records aren't great, but he certainly tried. Now
(22:09):
in Boston at the Tufts Medical College, Dr Timothy Leary
made a vaccine. Now, he made a blended vaccine using
the strains from the Chelsea Hospital, Chelsea Naval Hospital, a
nurse's nose from the Carney Hospital, and the infected wards
of Camp Devons, not far from Boston, and he made
(22:29):
a concoction and gave them to people. And actually his
vaccine ended up being sent to San Francisco, where eighteen
thousand people were inoculated with his vaccine. So that's Dr
Timothy Leary. And in case you're wondering, yes, the answer
is it is the same Dr Timothy Leary. In fact,
this is the uncle of the famous Dr Timothy Leary
(22:51):
in Boston. He who wanted us to turn on, tune in,
and drop out. It's his uncle who created this atten
at a vaccine one hundred years ago. So that's attempts
at vaccines back then.
Speaker 2 (23:04):
What do we do today? What do we have today?
Speaker 3 (23:07):
Well, we do have vaccines against the flu, but it's
really not a very good vaccine. I mean, if you
think about it, right, mumps, measles, rebella, polio, you get
them once or twice as a kid, and you're done. Right,
You're done, you finished, that's it. You're good to go.
You won't get the disease ever. But in terms of flu,
(23:28):
we're told that we need to get it every year,
a new flu shot. I just had it last year
and the year before. We're dealing with a vaccine that
is really not on the same level of effectiveness as
these others. In fact, in a good year, in a
good year with the wind blowing in the right direction,
the flu vaccine is about fifty to sixty percent effective
(23:49):
at best at best, So why is this right? Why
is this flu vaccine so hard to create? And the
answer is that we have this hollow ball that contains
the eight genes of the flu virus, and it makes
these proteins on the surface, and it's against those proteins
the vaccine is created. The problem is that flu is
such a good disguise, at a master of disguise, that
(24:12):
it changes the makeup of those surface proteins very very quickly,
and it mutates from one kind to another, so that
when we think we've got we figured out what kind
of flu is going to be around with species A,
well it turns out the species A then sort of
mutates and the vaccine is no longer effective against species A.
Oh and by the way, we didn't realize that species
B and C were actually going to be the ones,
(24:34):
so we didn't include those in the vaccine, and therefore
we weren't You weren't at vaccinated against those, which is
the reason, incidentally, by the reason that some of us
get the flu vaccine and we end up with the flu, right,
it's because not because the vaccine didn't work against that
particular strain, but because there were either other strains that
(24:54):
we weren't vaccinated against, or because the original strain changed
its surface structure just that bit, so that there's like
changing an overcoat from a brown overcoat to a black overcoat,
and the immune system didn't recognize it. And that's what's
going on with the flu vaccine. It stays one step
ahead of us.
Speaker 2 (25:12):
All the time. And it's a similar story with HIV.
Speaker 3 (25:16):
Right the promise of an HIV vaccine was we'd have
it within a year or two, so we were told.
Speaker 2 (25:21):
In nineteen eighty. Still not there.
Speaker 3 (25:23):
These viruses are very clever at changing their surface and
at hiding from the immune system, and so we still
don't have a good influenza vaccine. The way we make
the vaccine, incidentally, is we have about one hundred and
twenty or so laboratories across the world. They look at
samples that are sent to their lab and try and
figure out exactly the kind.
Speaker 2 (25:44):
Of flu a species that is prevalent.
Speaker 3 (25:48):
We look at Australia and what they had in their
most recent influenza outbreak, because it's there, you know, in
their winter as our summer, and we try and figure
that out, and incidentally they do the same for us
that they look at to see what happened in the
northern hemisphere and adjust themselves for the oncoming flu season
in the summer, and then doctors make the best educated
(26:10):
yes they can, and they say, well, based on the
evidence that we have, the most likely species are going
to be this and this and this, and we're going
to make the vaccine. And in to this day, the
majority of that much of the vaccine is produced using eggs.
The vaccine is very hard to grow, so it's actually
grown on eggs, which is the same thing that was
used a century ago.
Speaker 2 (26:29):
And so in many.
Speaker 3 (26:30):
Respects, we're really at the beginning of the fight here
against influenza by preventing it and creating a vaccine. Now,
while that that is all true, and it's not a
very effective vaccine, we must remember that in certain groups,
in certain age groups, it's extremely important to get the vaccine.
The high risk people, right, so those are children, the elderly,
(26:53):
those with immune compromised conditions, people who've been taking steroids
or may have undergone chemotherapy, pregnant women. Extremely important for
pregnant women to get the influenza vaccine. For some reason,
there are slightly more there are an increased risk of
complications from influenza, and so those are some of the
(27:16):
the high risk groups that should certainly be vaccinated. There's
no question there. In terms of everybody else, the data
out there is harder to to to really find an
effect on the flu. In fact, for instance, in the
United Kingdom, those high risk groups are targeted and everybody
else can sort of well, if you want one, you
can get one, go talk to your primary care doctor.
(27:37):
But there's no campaign. Right here in the US, we
have a campaign the CDC says everybody over the age
of six months should get vaccinated.
Speaker 2 (27:45):
Period.
Speaker 3 (27:46):
That is, that is the advice that we're given here
in the United States. It's just worth pointing out that
this is not the advice that is given overseas.
Speaker 2 (27:53):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (27:54):
And we can talk about why that might be another time,
but it's it's it's it's a bit. It's an important difference,
I think in the way we think about the flu.
So for high risk groups, it's very important. For healthy
otherwise healthy adults, the evidence is that influenza vaccine doesn't
really do a whole lot.
Speaker 2 (28:12):
We're still not there yet.
Speaker 3 (28:14):
So if we look at where we were one hundred
years ago and where we are today, the treatments are
very different, thankfully, but we still lack real good treatments
for influenza we understand the virus in in a remarkable
and deep and profound way, in a way that was
unimaginable a century ago. So my hope then, looking forward
(28:34):
is that we really will be able to see influenza
is not just a story of the past, but as
a disease of the past, in the way that we
think about smallpox as a disease of the past, a
disease that was eradicated.
Speaker 2 (28:47):
Thank you for your time and a.
Speaker 1 (28:49):
Terrific job on the production, editing and storytelling by ourn
Monty Montgomery, And a special thanks to the US National
Archives for allowing us to access this audio from doctor
Jeremy Brown's lecture there in twenty nineteen. Doctor Jeremy Brown
is the author of Influenza, The one hundred Year Hunt
to Cure the Deadliest Disease in History. My goodness that
(29:13):
stat he used early on in the storytelling that in
nineteen eighteen, because of the massive casualties in the United States,
the equivalent of three million today, life expectancy in the
United States dropped twelve years in one year. And we
still don't know enough about influenza and how to cure it.
(29:35):
But we know a lot more than we used to,
from thinking it came from oats, to knowing deep and
particular things about this disease and knowing its genetic makeup,
even even down to the nature of the viral particles
it consists of. The flu, though, is complex, we learn,
and it's ever changing and morphing. Like AIDS itself. These
(29:59):
two are tough to just get. They morph, they change,
They hide the story of the flu. The story is
so much more where technology and scientific and medical innovation was,
Where it is where it needs to go. Here on
our American stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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Football’s funniest family duo — Jason Kelce of the Philadelphia Eagles and Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs — team up to provide next-level access to life in the league as it unfolds. The two brothers and Super Bowl champions drop weekly insights about the weekly slate of games and share their INSIDE perspectives on trending NFL news and sports headlines. They also endlessly rag on each other as brothers do, chat the latest in pop culture and welcome some very popular and well-known friends to chat with them. Check out new episodes every Wednesday. Follow New Heights on the Wondery App, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to new episodes early and ad-free, and get exclusive content on Wondery+. Join Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And join our new membership for a unique fan experience by going to the New Heights YouTube channel now!
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