In October 1347, three ships arrived in the Italian port of Genoa. One chronicler wrote ominously, “it was as if they had brought evil spirits with them”. The Bubonic plague had arrived in Europe. Within just a few years, a quarter to half of the European population had died.
But the “Black Death”, the “greatest natural disaster in human history” didn’t start there. It is generally believed that the plague originated in Central Asia or China.
Now, new evidence is rapidly zeroing in on the origin of the “last of the great plagues”, the 1918 influenza which swept the world.
It came from China.
The deadly “Spanish flu” claimed more lives than World War I, which ended the same year the pandemic struck. Now, new research is placing the flu’s emergence in a forgotten episode of World War I: the shipment of Chinese laborers across Canada in sealed train cars.
The theory will need to be confirmed by viral samples, if they exist. But some historians are already convinced.
“This is about as close to a smoking gun as a historian is going to get,” says historian James Higgins, who lectures at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and who has researched the 1918 spread of the pandemic in the United States[…]
So, why “Spanish flu”? Because Spain, neutral during the War, was one of the few countries which didn’t censor news about the plague. Unlike the suddenly-coy mainstream media today, no-one was shy about tying the disease to a geographical location.
Still, the pandemic’s origins have long been debated.
France’s wartime trenches, ridden with filth, disease, and death, were originally seen as the flu’s breeding ground[…]A decade after the war, Kansas was identified as another possible breeding ground[…]
But in his study, Humphries reports that an outbreak of respiratory infections, which at the time were dubbed an endemic “winter sickness” by local health officials, were causing dozens of deaths a day in villages along China’s Great Wall. The illness spread 300 miles (500 kilometers) in six weeks’ time in late 1917.
Then, in an eerie echo of today’s globalised world (in fact, the period from the 1890s to WWI was the most intensive period of globalisation in history until at least the 1990s), the disease was quickly spread by imported cheap labour.
At the time of the outbreak, British and French officials were forming the Chinese Labor Corps, which eventually shipped some 94,000 laborers from northern China to southern England and France during the war[…]
The Chinese laborers arrived in southern England by January 1918 and were sent to France, where the Chinese Hospital at Noyelles-sur-Mer recorded hundreds of their deaths from respiratory illness.
So, what relevance does this have to the Xi Plague of today, other than that it came from China? Because information – accurate information, not propaganda – is crucial to tackling such disasters. History, after all, has a way of repeating.
In the end, however, knowing the origin of the disease might provide information that could help stop a future pandemic, making the search worthwhile.
“I would say that the takeaway message of all of this is to keep your eye on China” as a source of emerging diseases.
A recent study has cast some doubts Humphries’ theory, but the evidence remains inconclusive. Nevertheless, his 2014 warning is as ominous as the stark warnings from Chinese scientists, in 2007 and again just last year.
The point of this is not, as the mainstream media would have it, racism, or implying that Chinese people are somehow uniquely ‘dirty’ and ‘diseased’. That’s arrant racist nonsense. But, at the same time, we cannot let political correctness blind us.
Asia, densely populated, with a range of environments and lying on an east-west axis which dominates half the globe, has long been an evolutionary powerhouse. As Matt Ridley argues, bats, of all wild animals, are much like humans: mammals, living in large, densely packed colonies. Which facilitates the rapid mutations of new viruses.
Combine that with a culture of consuming wild animals bought and slaughtered on the spot in massive markets in the middle of huge cities, and we have what Chinese scientists themselves warned is a “time bomb”.
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