A Flu Pandemic Reduces Quality of Life for Babies

Initially, Almond doubted that the intrauterine conditions provided by a pregnant woman, even one sick with a virulent strain of the flu, could exert any lasting influence on her offspring. “When I started looking at the influenza pandemic, I was skeptical of the fetal origins hypothesis. I didn’t think I’d find any long-term effects,” Almond says. “But the evidence was the opposite of what I expected.” Through an analysis of census data, Almond discovered that those individuals gestated during the pandemic did poorly as children and adults compared to cohorts born shortly before or after the flu hit. “People who were in utero during the pandemic did worse, on average, on just about every socioeconomic outcome recorded,” he says. Over their lifetimes, they displayed lower educational attainment, lower income, and lower socioeconomic status; they suffered higher rates of disability, and required higher welfare payments. Individuals gestated during the pandemic were 15 percent less likely to graduate from high school, and 15 percent more likely to be poor; the men earned wages that were 5 to 9 percent lower, and they were 20 percent more likely to have heart disease or to be disabled as older adults. Even their height was affected: when the cohort of people born soon after the pandemic showed up for enlistment in World War II, they were shorter than recruits born the year before and the year after.

...Because of the long-lasting impact of prenatal conditions, Almond tells me, “you could say that the influenza pandemic of 1918 isn’t over yet.”

Children born during the flu pandemic grew up to have a poorer socioeconomic status than those born at other times.