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Vital Lessons to Be Learned From 1918 Flu
Emmy Fitri | October 28, 2009

Authorities battled to treat the sick and prevent the disease’s spread. (Photo courtesy of University of Indonesia’s School of History) Authorities battled to treat the sick and prevent the disease’s spread. (Photo courtesy of University of Indonesia’s School of History)
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See Also: Looking Through Indonesia's History for Answers to Swine Flu

Unlike the weather, it is virtually impossible to predict the emergence of a disease outbreak, or worse, a pandemic, but experts believe that history is the best teacher to prepare for recurrences.

Public health expert, Dr. Nyoman Kandun, the Health Ministry’s former director general for infectious disease and environmental health, said findings released by University of Indonesia historians on the 1918 flu pandemic should be used to inform the way preventive messages and public health campaigns are communicated to the people.

“Because it really happened here,” he said. “We used to refer to what happened in other countries when talking about the 1918 pandemic, but now I think we can make our preventive campaigns more relevant to the public so they can relate to our messages.”

Nyoman said the findings helped shed light on how the Dutch administration dealt with disease outbreaks.

“This is a valuable lesson for us today to see how the health sector must work with other sectors,” he said.

Firman Lubis, a senior lecturer at the University of Indonesia’s School of Medicine, said historical lessons needed to be put into a modern context .

“As a teacher, it’s been my personal dream to know what happened in Indonesia when the pandemic struck in 1918,” he said. “To get a complete picture, we need to relate this to the epidemiology situation and with thorough clinical records.”

The chief executive of the National Commission on Avian Influenza and Pandemic Preparedness, Bayu Krisnamurthi, cited the old saying that people would be condemned to repeat the same mistakes unless they learned from the past.

“When SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) and avian influenza struck, we used the excuse that these were new diseases and we needed to deal with them differently,” he said. “But even if the diseases are new, we have to learn from how our predecessors dealt with similar situations in the past.”