Few remember the SS Tuscania today. In April 1929, when smallpox broke on this large passenger ship sailing from Mumbai to Liverpool via Marseilles, it triggered a European health and travel crisis that had some eerie resemblances to the global shutdown we have now with the coronavirus. Worried at the prospect of smallpox, France banned travel from the UK for those without vaccinations.
The British saw the European smallpox lockdown as an unnecessary exaggeration and the dispute threatened the global movement of people and goods at a time of severe economic crisis. Nothing the British health ministry said would convince the French. The crisis was only defused, as information historian Heidi J Tworek has documented, when the League of Nations Health Organisation (LNHO) – the precursor of WHO – issued a reassuring epidemiological bulletin that was seen by all to be impartial and credible.
“>Arundyuti Das Basu
At a time when President Donald Trump has wrongly suspended US funding for WHO, accusing it of a pro-China bias in handling the coronavirus, the SS Tuscania episode underscores just how critical the flow of credible, impartial and scientifically sound medical information is at a time of global crisis. The LNHO officials seized on the Tuscania incident, Tworek has shown, as “an oppo
