1889 Pandemic Didn’t Need Planes to Circle Globe in 4 Months

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By Alexis Madrigal April 26, 2010 | 6:25 pm | Categories: Medicine


The 1889 Russian flu pandemic circled the globe in just four months, captivating the world, despite the lack of airplanes or hyperventilating cable news stations.

If that was possible, closing down air traffic in the event of a new pandemic might not do much, argue the authors led by Alain-Jacques Valleron, an epidemiologist at the Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale in Paris.

“The rapid progression of the 1889 pandemic demonstrates that slower surface travel, even with much smaller traveler flows, sufficed to spread the pandemic across all of Europe and the United States in ~4 months,” the researchers wrote in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on April 26. “This observation supports mathematical model results, which anticipated that restricting air transportation would have little, if any, effect. One possible hypothesis is that the important predictor of the speed of the pandemic is not the absolute numbers of passengers traveling between cities but the connectedness of the network of cities.”

The data on the disease were assembled for the first time from local records in 172 European and American cities. The Russian flu is particularly interesting because it was the first major epidemic to strike Europe after the laying down of dense railroad connections. In 1889, there were already more than 125,000 miles of rail lines connecting European cities. (That’s more mileage than exists today, the authors note).



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