His wealthy grandfather had bought a home for Roy and Tess McCarthy, who were then living with their four children in Seattle, and ordered them back to Minneapolis. The entire family (including the eldest child, 6-year-old Mary McCarthy, the future novelist) became ill on the train journey east. At their destination, the adults were taken off the train on stretchers. McCarthy’s father died first, and his mother succumbed a day later.
He recalled being told by his grandparents that his parents had gone away. The actor said he has always associated that traumatic turning point in his life with Armistice Day in Minneapolis, marking the end of the Great War in Europe.
“Whistles were blowing, bells ringing, horses braying; there were automobile horns – all kinds of noise,” he said. He remembered himself as “this little kid, who was standing in a pile of snow at 11 o’clock in the morning, and wondering what had happened to his parents, who had disappeared suddenly.”
Perhaps the most disturbing piece of information coming out of Mexico over the last 48 hours is that which suggests that many of the victims of the swine flu are young adults in their 20s and 30s, just as Roy and Tess McCarthy were, 90 years ago. Flu usually affects most severely the elderly, the very young and others with weaker immune systems. Healthy younger adults dying from flu is something that inevitably stirs up folk memories of the post-World War I pandemic, which claimed tens of millions of lives, including up to a million Americans. It was the demographic that was hit hardest in 1918-20. In some cases, people who were perfectly fine one day were dead the next.
It’s believed that the victims’ healthy immune systems “overreacted” to the virus. Medical officials have been talking in similar terms in recent days.
The government has wisely declared a federal health emergency, even though the number of confirmed cases has been relatively small in the U.S. Officials dismissed as “premature” the recommendation from the European Union’s health commissioner that people “should avoid traveling to Mexico or the United States of America unless it is very urgent for them.”
There’s no easy answer. The Americans don’t want too much of a disruption to the economy and society without sufficient cause. Some Europeans might, on the other hand, see the commissioner’s call as prudent in the short term.
Then there’s the issue of the appropriate response by ordinary citizens. There are some in our community who are in panic mode much of the time. But the flip side is that others don’t take such threats seriously enough. Certainly, we’ve made extraordinary medical advances over the past century, and we must assume that we have the organizational capacity to deal with swine flu. Yet we’ve become oblivious, it seems, to the possibility that new viruses and new strains of old viruses will get past our best defenses. In just a few decades, we’ve forgotten that death by disease occurred far more frequently over most of human history than it does today in the Western world.
For now, citizens need to remain calm, but also must listen carefully to and take seriously recommendations made by the health authorities.