7. Aspirin overdoses were responsible for thousands of deaths
The Spanish Flu pandemic coincided with the patents on aspirin held by Bayer expiring. Scores of pharmaceutical manufacturers began making and marketing the drug, which was widely prescribed by doctors for relieving the symptoms of the illness. The severity of the symptoms led some doctors to prescribe huge doses of aspirin. The American Medical Association in its Journal recommended doses of between 8 and 31 grams of aspirin, a suggestion which was backed by the Surgeon General of the United States. A normal dose of two aspirin is 650 milligrams. The massive doses administered by physicians, or self-administered by their patients, led to often fatal consequences.
The consequences of an aspirin overdose were little understood by the physicians of the day. It later became understood that a dose at the levels being recommended in 1918 could cause hyperventilation in about one-third of all patients. It could also cause congestion to build up in the lungs, leading to congestive heart failure. The death rate from Spanish Flu spiked in October, 1918, coincident with the recommendations to use massive doses of aspirin to treat the symptoms of the illness. How many died of aspirin overdoses has never been accurately determined, since aspirin killed in much the same manner as the flu itself, and the consequences of aspirin overdose were masked by the same symptoms it was prescribed to treat.