When the global flu pandemic reigned in the fall of 1918, the body count was devastating. The vicious strain killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide, including 30,000 New Yorkers.
“It was one of the deadliest events in human history,” Sarah Henry, chief curator at the Museum of the City of New York, tells The Post.
A century later, that terrifying virus has inspired “Germ City: Microbes and the Metropolis” at MCNY, opening Friday. The exhibit, which was co-created by the New York Academy of Medicine, examines the effects of germs in this bustling city, where pathogens invisibly trail residents and tourists.
Although the flu of 1918 is the most dramatic of NYC’s past plagues, numerous other infections have had a profound impact on the way we deal with disease in such a crowded, busy setting.
“[With each epidemic,] there have been shifts in public policy and urban planning to try to minimize the spread of disease,” Rebecca Jacobs, a curator of “Germ City,” tells The Post. She says that everything from housing laws to infrastructure have been affected by the ongoing fight against infectious microbes.
Read on to learn about four of the nastiest bugs that have crept through the city — and the ways they transformed New York.
Cholera
The sickening story: This fast-moving bacterial infection arrived here from Asia and Europe in 1832, and killed more than 3,500 New Yorkers within months. It was most virulent in areas where the drinking water was dirty, so the city’s poorest residents suffered the most. The disease caused intense intestinal symptoms that led to death from severe dehydration — often within just 24 hours.
The solution: “At first, nobody understood that [contaminated water] was the means of transmission,” says Henry. It took doctors about two years to figure it out. Their discovery drove the city to create a municipal water system: the Croton Aqueduct, which debuted in 1842 and shuttled clean water from Westchester into the city.
Tuberculosis
The sickening story: Both rich and poor residents were affected by TB, or consumption, as it was once known. But the highly contagious illness, which causes incessant coughing, weight loss and, eventually, death, reached epidemic levels in crowded tenements by the late 19th century. Healthy people even tried to avoid the so-called “lung blocks” downtown, where symptoms were rampant.
The solution: “The awareness that tuberculosis afflicted people who were living in places where they didn’t get fresh air and circulation led to the housing-reform movement,” Henry explains. Now, apartments are required to have better ventilation, and Henry even says that “the advent of the air shaft” sprung from TB-driven housing reform.
Diphtheria
The sickening story: This bacterial disease, which plagued city dwellers through the 19th and early 20th centuries, began like a typical upper respiratory infection, with a sore throat and a fever. But soon it turned deadly, as a membrane grew over the patient’s throat, cutting off airflow. Although people of all ages were affected, it most commonly claimed the lives of young children.
The solution: A vaccine was developed in the late 1800s, and became widely available by the 1920s. “By 1927, more than 82,000 school children had successfully been immunized,” Anne Garner, a rare-books curator at the New York Academy of Medicine’s library, tells The Post. She says that the vaccine made New Yorkers “more open to immunization in school settings,” which were used to contain later outbreaks of polio and rubella.
Polio
The sickening story: Weirdly, the polio epidemic in the early 20th century can be traced to citywide improvements in plumbing and sanitation. It’s now believed that 19th-century city dwellers were all exposed to polio, which meant there was widespread, protective immunity. But nobody knew that at the time — so when thousands of New Yorkers became paralyzed and started dying from the disease in 1916, people panicked. A (false) rumor spread that household pets were the transmitters — and a whopping 72,000 cats and 8,000 dogs were executed.
The solution: “Eventually, people realized that the virus could be killed by a lot of things, including chlorine,” explains Henry. “Even before the polio vaccine was developed [in the 1950s], they start chlorinating swimming pools.” While polio has been all but eradicated today, what Henry calls “the chlorine legacy” of the epidemic lives on.