Parrot Fever: The Forgotten Bird Murder Pandemic of 1929
![Parrot Fever: The Forgotten Bird Murder Pandemic of 1929](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/2/7/7/882277_320x180.jpg)
In the modern era, we’ve gotten way too familiar with pandemics over the course of, oh, our entire lives. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, there was swine flu, bird flu, normal flu -- we live in a veritable menagerie of influenza. Back in the ’20s and ’30s, though, the flu was almost as mysterious as the economy. We were only about a decade removed from the Spanish flu pandemic, which just up and disappeared one day for reasons we still can’t really explain and no one wanted to question for fear of jinxing it.
So when parrots and their owners started dropping dead, people were primed to react like Muppets in a burning building. There was panic, a backlash to the panic, and finally a bunch of dead scientists, which eventually led to the creation of the National Institute of Health. That’s right: Bird murder gave birth to centralized American medical research.
Parrot Fever
![The Parrot Fever of 1929 Basically super deadly pneumonia. Psittacosis, as parrot fever is known to serious types, causes symptoms similar to pneumonia, but it kills between 15% and 30% of those infected. It can only be passed to humans from birds, which will explain a lot. CRACKED](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/9/3/0/881930.jpg)
Fashionably Deadly
![The Parrot Fever of 1929 The Argentina parrot fever epidemic. Unbeknownst to most Americans, Argentina was experiencing an outbreak of parrot fever in 1929, after a theater bird killed two actors (with psittacosis, not, like, its talons). Otherwise, they probably would have stopped importing tons of parrots, which were the day's hottest pet, from the country. CRACKED](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/9/2/8/881928.jpg)
A Parrot in a Pear Tree
![The Parrot Fever of 1929 Simon Martin's bummer Christmas. A Baltimore man named Simon Martin bought his wife an Argentinian parrot for Christmas, but by Christmas Eve, it was looking like the ghost of Christmas presents. The next day it was dead, which is one of the many reasons you don't buy living beings as gifts. CRACKED](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/9/2/9/881929.jpg)
The Martins’ Malady
![The Parrot Fever of 1929 Parrot fever patients zero. Bady chem ake we idum sulfed Acidum REAGE REAGENTIAL By the first week of January, Martin's whole family had come down with an illness diagnosed as parrot fever by their doctor, who wrote to the public health service demanding a serum only to find out that wasn't a thing. CRACKED](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/9/2/7/881927.jpg)
Bildagentur Zoonar GmbH/Shutterstock,
Oleksandr Lysenko/Shutterstock
Old Maid’s Pneumonia
![The Parrot Fever of 1929 Parrot fever spreads. By January 15, 50 cases of parrot fever had been reported in the U.S. and even more in Europe and the Middle East It picked up the nickname old maid's pneumonia, because so many victims were lonely women who kissed their birds, so maybe consider not doing that. CRACKED](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/9/2/0/881920.jpg)
Panic at the Birdcage
![The Parrot Fever of 1929 The media whipped up a seeding frenzy. NEWYORM EARTH 111 DOOMED EXT CIRES For about a week, headlines in newspapers across the country breathlessly reported new cases, and then deaths as people - seven in total- started to die. Pet stores were ordered to close, which may have been as much for the bird's protection as anyone else's. CRACKED](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/9/2/6/881926.jpg)
Kill the Beast
![The Parrot Fever of 1929 Bird murder (birder?) As fear spread with the disease, people began abandoning their parrots in the streets and even city officials openly advised them to strangle their pets. Navy officials even ordered sailors to throw their pet parrots overboard, apparently forgetting they could fly. CRACKED](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/9/2/2/881922.jpg)
Banning Birds
![The Parrot Fever of 1929 Importing parrots was briefly outlawed. Things got so bad that even the president got dragged into it. On January 24, Herbert Hoover issued an executive order banning the import of parrots, because he clearly didn't have enough to do. CRACKED](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/9/2/5/881925.jpg)
Library of Congress/Wiki Commons, N.Z.Photography/Shutterstock
The Twist
![The Parrot Fever of 1929 It turned out many people just had pneumonia. Even in 1930, doctors couldn't keep up with the media, and parrot fever was never as widespread as it claimed. In fact, none of the deaths reported were actually attributable to parrot fever. CRACKED](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/9/3/4/881934.jpg)
What Do You Get When You Cross a Parrot With a Fever?
![The Parrot Fever of 1929 The media machine keeps spinning. As quickly as the media turned the pandemic into a panic, they turned it into a joke. Headlines suddenly insisted the whole thing was overblown, and writers churned out punchlines that would have been read by hacky late night hosts if TV had been invented yet. CRACKED](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/9/2/4/881924.jpg)
The Double Twist
![The Parrot Fever of 1929 Scientists start dying. Just when everyone started thinking they were safe, scientists at the Baltimore City Health Department and the Hygiene Laboratory in D.C. who'd been studying the disease started getting sick and a few of them even died. Yes, it turned out, parrot fever was real after all. CRACKED](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/9/2/3/881923.jpg)
Weird Science
![The Parrot Fever of 1929 An unorthodox experiment. When one of the lead investigators at the Hygiene Laboratory, Charles Armstrong, got sick, his boss, George McCoy, took a literal stab at treating him with a blood transfusion from another scientist who'd recovered. Amazingly, it worked. CRACKED](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/9/1/9/881919.jpg)
Scorched Earth (And Monkeys)
![The Parrot Fever of 1929 George McCoy burns it all down. McCoy, the director of the Hygiene Lab, took it upon himself to personally smother every lab rat (and parrot and monkey) in the joint, burn their bodies, and fumigate the building with cyanide. You could say it was overkill, but you can't argue with results. CRACKED](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/9/1/8/881918.jpg)
nasti23033/Shutterstock,
Branislav Zivkovic/Shutterstock,
wk1003mike/Shutterstock
Getting Promoted
![The Parrot Fever of 1929 The Hygiene Laboratory became the National Institute of Health. The Hygiene Laboratory still exists, but there's a reason you've never heard of it. Their work with parrot fever convinced Congress to give them more funding, bigger projects, and a new name: the National Institute of Health. You've definitely heard of that one. INSTITUTES NATIONAL OF HEALTH CRACKED](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/9/1/7/881917.jpg)
What the Hell?
![The Parrot Fever of 1929 We didn't know what parrot fever actually was for decades. It still took scientists more than 30 more years to identify the bacterium that causes parrot fever. It still infects a handful of people every year, but like most bacteria that almost ended the world, penicillin will clear that right up. CRACKED](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/9/1/6/881916.jpg)