DENVER – It’s been a long-held assumption that the influenza pandemic that decimated a fifth of the world’s population more than a hundred years ago went after everyone – the young, the old, and even those who the flu doesn’t normally kill. But new research out of CU Boulder suggests that conventional wisdom may not be true, after all.
Using skeletons obtained from the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, which houses more than 3,000 skeletal remains, the researchers examined the shinbones of 369 people who died before and during the 1918 pandemic. “This idea that the 1918 flu killed healthy young people is not supported by our findings,” said Sharon DeWitte, a professor of anthropology at CU Boulder who specializes in bioarchaeology — the study of human history based on material remains found at archeological sites. “It may be one of those ideas that begins as folk wisdom and gets reproduced in the literature over and over until it becomes canon.
The researchers suspect that, like with COVID-19, socioeconomic status, education, access to healthcare, and institutional racism may have played a role.