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About The nugget. (Sisters, Or.) 1994-current | View Entire Issue (Jan. 24, 2018)
30 Wednesday, January 24, 2018 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon OSU seeks nutrition education volunteers Those interested in teaching others about food and shopping choices for a healthier lifestyle might enjoy sharing research- based information about healthy eating on a budget by becoming an Oregon State University Extension Service Nutrition Education Volunteer. Volunteers demonstrate cooking healthy recipes at local food pantries. To become a Nutrition Education Volunteer appli- cants take a five-hour class on Wednesday, January 31, 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the OSU/ Deschutes County Extension office in Redmond. Once participants are trained and certified, volunteers com- mit to demonstrating healthy recipes six times over six months. See the Nutrition E d u c a t i o n Vo l u n t e e r Application link to read more about the program and see the application on the OSU/Deschutes County website: http://extension. oregonstate.edu/deschutes/ nutrition-education. To apply, send your appli- cation by January 26 to Katie Ahern, Family & Community H e a l t h I n s t r u c t o r, b y email to katherine.ahern@ oregonstate.edu; or postal mail addressed to OSU Extension, 1900 NE Division St., Suite 107, Bend, OR 97701. For more information call 541-306-6067. DEADLIEST FLU: This year is bad, but not historically bad Continued from page 1 they’ve ever grappled with. Influenza A — H3N2 — is the prevalent strain this year, according to the Centers for Disease Control. CDC reports that H3 viruses often lead to more widespread and more serious cases of the flu, especially in young children and elderly adults. Bad as it is, this flu sea- son cannot compare to one that occurred exactly 100 years ago — a pandemic that has been called the greatest medical catastrophe in human history. What was then known as the Spanish Flu hit Europe and the United States in a lethal storm in early 1918, as the world limped into what would be the fourth and final year of the First World War. Illness had started cropping up late in 1917, but muta- tions and rapid spread due to wartime conditions pushed the accelerator to the floor in early 1918. The influ- enza came in two waves, the second wave deadlier than the first. In the wake of the global pandemic, some 675,000 Americans had died. Globally, the pandemic took the lives of as many as 50 to 100 million people. Strangely, many of them were otherwise healthy young adults. s s s The origin of the flu remains mysterious and con- troversial. Some researchers believe it originated in Asia and was brought to Europe among some 96,000 Chinese laborers mobilized for the Western Front in France. A strain of upper respira- tory virus loose in northern China in 1917 was thought to be identical to the Spanish Flu. Chinese researchers, not surprisingly, dispute that research and argue that the flu was circulating in Europe well before the pandemic outbreak. Why “Spanish” flu? Wartime censorship sup- pressed the extent and sever- ity of the outbreak on the Western Front in France and Belgium — which was affecting all armies. But news from neutral Spain, where censorship did not reign, revealed the fearful toll. King Alphonso of Spain nearly died of it. With all of the news about the flu com- ing out of Spain, the media and the public hung the moni- ker Spanish Flu on the deadly virus. And deadly it was — so deadly that some victims were fine in the morning and dead by nightfall. The youth and vigor of many of its vic- tims posed a horrific puzzle for doctors. The war crowded thou- sands of people together and moved them in unprec- edented masses across con- tinents, which doubtless contributed to rapid spread. War-related malnourishment, especially in Germany, which was feeling the severe pinch of an Allied naval blockade, may have reduced resistance. But no one factor readily accounts for the extreme lethality of the 1918 outbreak. Modern researchers surmise that the special PHOTO PUBLIC DOMAIN The flu ward at Walter Reed Hospital, 1918. The flu outbreak of that year was the deadliest in history, taking millions of lives across the globe. virulence of the Spanish flu, and the profile of its victims, point to the flu triggering a “cytokine storm,” a hyper- active immune response that overwhelms the body. Counterintuitively, in such cases a strong immune sys- tem — as in a young, vigor- ous man or woman — was a liability. Deaths spiked in the sec- ond wave of the pandemic in October 1918, but then flu cases dropped off signifi- cantly. Public health mea- sures to prevent spread, better treatment of the pneumonia that took off many victims, and/or a mutation to a less- lethal strain may account for the dissipation of the pan- demic — but no one really know for sure. Despite having killed more people by far than the Great War itself, the flu pandemic of 1918 is little remembered today. The war ended, the flu dissipated, the ’20s roared. Then the world fell into the twin catastrophes of the Great Depression and the Second World War, which over- shadowed the earlier crisis and pushed it into the shad- ows of historical memory. But every time influenza strikes hard — as it did most recently in the 2009 Swine Flu pandemic — the specter of 1918 rises to haunt us. For pathologists and public health officials know that someday a pandemic on the scale of 1918 WILL come again. This, miserable as it is, is not that year. Looking for good news? A Partnership Beyond Your Expectations Stop by and visit with Tiana Van Landuyt & Shelley Marsh. 220 S. Pine St., Ste. 102 | 541-548-9180 We Find Homes for Everyone in the Family Send them the local news from Sisters! A gift subscription to The Nugget is a thoughtful gift for loved ones far away. Subscriptions start at just $25 and are looked forward to every week! Principal Broker/Owner, Ali Mayea Sisters HomeLand Realty 541-588-6007 | 401 E. Main Ave. To order a gift subscription call 541-549-9941.
