Another Epidemic?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/health/13aspirin.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=aspirin%20related%20to%20the%20flu&st=cse

With the recent development of H1N1, a new strain of the flu which has affected almost 95,000 people, doctors all over America are worried about this year’s flu season. However, if there is a pandemic, it certainly will not be the first the United States has seen. The pandemic of 1918 killed more than 50 million people world wide, making it one of the most deadly, if not the deadliest, pandemics in human history. The plague was due to the deadly influenza A virus strain which is actually a subtype of H1N1. The pandemic lasted from 1918 to 1920 and it is said to have infected about 500 million people, one third of the world’s population at the time.
Recently there has been research that shows a small number of these deaths may have actually have been caused by the miracle drug at the time used to treat the disease, Aspirin. Dr. Karen M. Starko is one of the firsts to make recent discoveries connecting an overdose of aspirin to Reyes Syndrome and deaths during the pandemic. High doses of aspirin, seen as very unsafe today, were used to treat the flu and the symptoms of aspirin overdose may have been very hard to distinguish from signs of the flue. Many autopsies produced evidence of profuse lung damage, which many Public Health Service saw as a result of some unknown cause that couldn’t have been the flu.
Another attributing factor is the fact that in 1917, a year before the epidemic, Bayer lost its American patent on the drug. The company fought back by issuing a huge advertising campaign at the peak of the epidemic that promoted the drug's effectiveness. The Surgeon General endorsed the use of aspirin and encouraged its use even though the packaged aspirin came no warnings of the drug's toxicity or instructions of use, resulting in an ingestion of a dosage that is almost twice as much as considered safe today.
Though there is a lot of promising evidence of the overdose of aspirin being a cause of death for some, it is hard to prove due to the fact that things were extremely hectic at the time and make shift hospitals and clinics did not always document in detail the conditions of every case they saw and many went undocumented all together. It is also hard to say how many people were taking the unsafe dosage. Military archives may be the one promising place to look to find how many deaths were attributed to the overconsumption of aspirin. Further research has not been done, but it is an interesting idea none the less that the cure for the disease may have played a deadly role.