A year ago, the Framingham History Center presented “Framingham and the Flu: The 1918 Pandemic” featuring former Framingham Public Health Nurse Kathleen Hursen and former State Epidemiologist Dr. Alfred DeMaria (watch the full program here). At the time, the presentation was fascinating – now this history carries much more weight.
A year before the 1918 flu pandemic broke out, public health nurses and doctors visited households throughout Framingham as part of the groundbreaking Framingham Community Health and Tuberculosis Demonstration. The “TB Study” staff examined every Framingham resident and taught them how to best stop the spread of disease. When the 1918 flu pandemic arrived a year later, Framingham fared better than most communities with one of the lowest death rates in the country.
Given the COVID-19 pandemic, Kathleen wrote the attached article as a public service. It is a reminder about the importance of consistent public health messaging and how, when best practices were implemented in the 1918 flu pandemic, they saved lives in Framingham while other communities that did not heed the messages had a much greater loss of life.