General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsWatched "American Experience: 1918 Influenza" last night.
The program didn't claim to say where the flu originated from, but said the first cases cropped up in Kansas, after a massive manure fire that got swept up into a dust storm and enveloped a nearby army base. The first cases came from the soldiers there. From there, it spread to other army bases, went to Europe, came back with returning soldiers, and was even more virulent.
Interesting. I had never heard that before. The stories I'd always heard is that it emerged in the trenches of WWI.
The deadliest month was October of 1918.
Makes me nervous about this coming fall.....
dewsgirl
(14,961 posts)out there.
Coventina
(27,084 posts)(as you know, I'm posting so maybe other DUers will watch it!)
rampartc
(5,399 posts)sometimes i watch nature (i usually watch with my cats, who love the show) or nova and wonder of these would ever be made for commercial tv.
Coventina
(27,084 posts)They require attention and thoughtful digestion.
(No pun intended on "Nature"
rampartc
(5,399 posts)but if a wildebeest herd ever wander through my neighborhood i think they have it covered.
Submariner
(12,502 posts)[link:
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uponit7771
(90,323 posts)dalton99a
(81,426 posts)There is also a 2017 Smithsonian article:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/journal-plague-year-180965222/
How the Horrific 1918 Flu Spread Across America
The toll of historys worst epidemic surpasses all the military deaths in World War I and World War II combined. And it may have begun in the United States
By John M. Barry
Smithsonian Magazine | November 2017
Haskell County, Kansas, lies in the southwest corner of the state, near Oklahoma and Colorado. In 1918 sod houses were still common, barely distinguishable from the treeless, dry prairie they were dug out of. It had been cattle countrya now bankrupt ranch once handled 30,000 headbut Haskell farmers also raised hogs, which is one possible clue to the origin of the crisis that would terrorize the world that year. Another clue is that the county sits on a major migratory flyway for 17 bird species, including sand hill cranes and mallards. Scientists today understand that bird influenza viruses, like human influenza viruses, can also infect hogs, and when a bird virus and a human virus infect the same pig cell, their different genes can be shuffled and exchanged like playing cards, resulting in a new, perhaps especially lethal, virus.
We cannot say for certain that that happened in 1918 in Haskell County, but we do know that an influenza outbreak struck in January, an outbreak so severe that, although influenza was not then a reportable disease, a local physician named Loring Minera large and imposing man, gruff, a player in local politics, who became a doctor before the acceptance of the germ theory of disease but whose intellectual curiosity had kept him abreast of scientific developmentswent to the trouble of alerting the U.S. Public Health Service. The report itself no longer exists, but it stands as the first recorded notice anywhere in the world of unusual influenza activity that year. The local newspaper, the Santa Fe Monitor, confirms that something odd was happening around that time: Mrs. Eva Van Alstine is sick with pneumonia...Ralph Lindeman is still quite sick...Homer Moody has been reported quite sick...Pete Hessers three children have pneumonia ...Mrs J.S. Cox is very weak yet...Ralph Mc-Connell has been quite sick this week...Mertin, the young son of Ernest Elliot, is sick with pneumonia,...Most everybody over the country is having lagrippe or pneumonia.
Several Haskell men who had been exposed to influenza went to Camp Funston, in central Kansas. Days later, on March 4, the first soldier known to have influenza reported ill. The huge Army base was training men for combat in World War I, and within two weeks 1,100 soldiers were admitted to the hospital, with thousands more sick in barracks. Thirty-eight died. Then, infected soldiers likely carried influenza from Funston to other Army camps in the States24 of 36 large camps had outbreakssickening tens of thousands, before carrying the disease overseas. Meanwhile, the disease spread into U.S. civilian communities.