Abstract
The influenza pandemic of 1918-19 was the most devastating pandemic of the 20th century. It killed an estimated 50–100 million people worldwide. In late 1918, when the severity of the disease was apparent, the Australian Quarantine Service was established. Vessels returning from overseas and inter-state were intercepted, and people were examined for signs of illness and quarantined. Some of these vessels carried the infection throughout their voyage and cases were prevalent by the time the ship arrived at a Quarantine Station. We study four outbreaks that took place on board the Medic, Boonah, Devon, and Manuka in late 1918. These ships had returned from overseas and some of them were carrying troops that served in the First World War. By analysing these outbreaks under a stochastic Bayesian hierarchical modeling framework, we estimate the transmission rates among crew and passengers aboard these ships. Furthermore, we ask whether the removal of infectious, convalescent, and healthy individuals after arriving at a Quarantine Station in Australia was an effective public health response.
Funder
University of Melbourne
Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Mathematical and Statistical Frontiers
Publisher
Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Subject
Computational Theory and Mathematics,Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience,Genetics,Molecular Biology,Ecology,Modeling and Simulation,Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
Reference43 articles.
1. Mortality from the influenza pandemic of 1918–19 in Indonesia;S Chandra;Population studies,2013
2. The influenza epidemic of 1918–19 in Western Samoa;SM Tomkins;The Journal of Pacific History,1992
3. The geography and mortality of the 1918 influenza pandemic;KD Patterson;Bulletin of the History of Medicine,1991
4. The 1918 Spanish flu in Spain;A Trilla;Clinical infectious diseases,2008
5. An Australian perspective of the 1918–1919 influenza pandemic;P Curson;New South Wales public health bulletin,2006