How has Texas benefited from the panhandle winds? a Texas has turned wind into energy.
b. Texas has used wind to farm crops.
Texas has used wind to stop hurricanes.
d. Texas has used wind to prevent tornadoes.
C.

In the last 150 years the world has seen an unprecedented improvement in health. The visualization shows that in many countries life expectancy, which measures the average age of death, doubled from around 40 years or less to more than 80 years. This was not just an achievement across these countries; life expectancy has doubled in all regions of the world.

What also stands out is how abrupt and corrupting negative health events can be. Most striking is the large, sudden decline of life expectancy in 1918, caused by an unusually deadly influenza pandemic that became known as the ‘Spanish flu’.

To make sense of the fact life expectancy declined so abruptly, one has to understand what it measures. Period life expectancy, which is the precise name for this measure, only looks at the mortality pattern in one particular year and then captures this snapshot of population health as the average age of death of a hypothetical cohort of people for which that year’s mortality pattern would remain constant throughout their entire lifetimes. Period life expectancy is a measure of the population’s health in one year. [If you want to understand this in more detail you find our discussion of it here.]

This influenza outbreak wasn’t restricted to Spain and it didn’t even originate there (recent research by Olson et al. (2005) suggests that the epidemic originated in New York due to evidence of a pre-pandemic wave of the virus in that city).

But it was named as such because Spain was neutral in the First World War (1914-18), which meant it was free to report on the severity of the pandemic, while countries that were fighting tried to suppress reports on how the influenza impacted their population to maintain morale and not appear weakened in the eyes of the enemies.

The influenza outbreak started in the Northern Hemisphere in the spring of 1918. The virus spread rapidly and eventually reached all parts of the world: the epidemic became a pandemic.

Even in a much less-connected world the virus eventually reached extremely remote places such as the Alaskan wilderness and Samoa in the middle of the Pacific islands.

While peak mortality was reached in 1918 the pandemic did not end until two years later in late 1920.