It’s Monday, March 11, 1918, at a military training facility in Kansas called Fort Riley.
Around 26,000 young men are stationed there, and on that particular day a mess cook named Private Albert Gitchell woke up feeling like hell.
He had a high fever, his throat was sore, and his body ached all over.
The man went to see a nurse, and indeed, the guy was burning up.
He had a temperature of 103°F (39.4 C).
Soon after Gitchell, one Corporal Lee Drakevisited the nurse with pretty much the same symptoms.
Sergeant Adolph Hurby was next to join the line, and that line would keep getting longer and longer.
That’s a matter of controversy, but more and more sick American soldiers at camps all over the country would head to the battlefields of Europe.
Before we get to just how devastating this flu was, given what we’ve just told you, you are probably wondering why it was called the “Spanish flu” and not
Well, as to where the flu originated has been studied by many researchers for many years.
In 1916 to 1917, in France, 100s of thousands of soldiers passed through a certain hospital camp.
There, military pathologists reported a flu-like disease that had a high mortality rate.
One theory, and a serious one at that, is that the disease spread from the poultry at the camp, onto the pigs, and then to the humans.
Other researchers have postulated that it started in Austria, or China, or some parts of East Asia, or indeed the USA.
It might have been imported to Europe, originated in Europe, and that discussion is still going on.
The reason we call it the Spanish Flu is mere because Spain’s media wasn’t heavily censored during wartime and so that country’s newspapers made it look like Spain (neutral in the
war) was the worst-hit country of all, which wasna true.
It should be called, “Not The Spanish Flu.” This deadly flu travelled fast, and it's estimated that around 27 per cent of the world’s population of 1.8 to 1.9 billion people got infected.
It’s hard to get the exact numbers, and the estimates vary widely, but it’s thought the death toll of this flu was at least 50million and maybe as much as 100 million.
That’s more people than died in world war one.
Around half a million people from the USA died from the flu, and what’s surprising, is that young adults from their 20s to their40s were the worst hit.
To put that into perspective for you, in 1917the life expectancy in the U.S.
was 51…in 1918 it had dropped to 39.
The theory why the virus seemed to kill more people who you could say should have had the strongest immune systems, those in the prime of their life is that a
similar flu pandemic had happened some decades earlier but that flu wasn’t quite as lethal.
The survivors of that flu may have developed an immunity and so when the Spanish Flu came around they dealt with it better.
As for it not getting the very young people, the theory is the flu had less effect on them.
There’s another reason the healthiest people died, and we’ll get around to that soon.
This Spanish flu was virtually in every part of the world.
In India, an estimated 17 million people died, around five per cent of the country’s population.
In the Dutch East Indies around 1.5 million people died.
In Britain, 250,000 flu deaths were reported in France 400,000 people died.
In Iran the number of people that died was between 902,400 and 2,431,000.
Some smaller rural communities were the worst hit in terms of death ratios, and that’s because they tended to live in closer confines.
For example, in German Samoa, 90 per cent of the population came down with the Spanish Flu.
30% of adult men died, as did 22% of adult women as well as 10% of the children.
Few places in the world were not hit by the flu and that is because they were so remote.
For example, islands in Fiji, in the SouthPacific called the Lau and Yasawa islands, had no cases, as did Marajo island on Brazil’sAmazon delta.
Some parts of Alaska were also spared of thehorrors of the pandemic.
We’re not going to spend an entire showon the death toll estimates from all over the world because that would take up all thetime, and we are sure by
now you understand that the Spanish Flu wreaked havoc acrossall four corners of the globe and was one of the most terrifying things that happenedin the 20th century.
Let’s talk about how it spread so fast andwhy it couldn’t be contained.
Well, for one thing, infected soldiers livingin close quarters in often terrible conditions didn’t help matters, neither did the factthose soldiers were travelling far and wide.
The war was a “world” war and it involvedmany countries, some with empires and many colonies.
It’s believed that there was a first waveof the flu, but the deadlier second wave spread so fast because of wartime troop movements.
This is how one historian put it, “The entiremilitary industrial complex of moving lots of men and material in crowded conditionswas certainly a huge contributing factor in the ways Next would come nasal hemorrhaging and pneumonia,their lungs would fill with fluid and they would literally drown in that fluid.
Doctors at the time were not aware of whatwas happening.
Some British doctors said the state of thedeceased lungs were so bad that chemical warfare had to be to blame.
We now know that there is a condition knownas “cytokine explosion.” This is basically an immune response fromthe body to help a person when he or she has been
But there can be an over-reaction, and whenthe body sends too many of the messenger proteins called cytokines this can create an explosion.
The downside to this is inflammation and thatfluid build-up in the lungs we just mentioned.
This might also be the reason mostly peoplein their 20s to 40s died, because their really strong immune systems caused the biggest stormsof cytokine.
Now let’s let you listen to the words ofa U.S.
surgeon general who witnessed the sight of hundreds of young soldiers entering a hospital,all suffering from the Spanish Flu.
This is how he described the scene:“They are placed on the cots until every bed is full, yet others crowd in.
Their faces soon wear a bluish cast; a distressingcough brings up the blood stained sputum.
In the morning the dead bodies are stackedabout the morgue like cord wood.” Back then doctors didn’t know what the viruswas, and they weren’t equipped with electron microscopes to
These days doctors do have those things andthey know how to isolate a virus, and because of that they can look at its genetic sequenceand then attempt to create
antiviral drugs and hopefully come up with a vaccine.
In 1918, when all the troops from around theworld were mixing together and going back to their hometowns, there was no such technology.
On top of that, when people showed early signsof the disease and moved about in public it was hard to test them and so they weren’tquarantined as they would be now.
Humans are now very good at estimating wherethe virus will spread and so can isolate various places. None of that happened back then, and therewas no way workers could just choose to work at home or people could go on the Internetto find the latest news.
As we said, most media during the war, includingthat of the U.S., the U.K.
and France were not reporting the spread of the deadly diseasebecause that didn’t look good for the war effort.
Spain did most of the media reporting, andif you hadn’t done your research you’d think this flu originated there.
We should say this, though, the authoritiesdid know that people spread disease to other people.
Europeans and most of the rest of the worldknew all about pandemics, and that infected people should be kept away from healthy people. Research shows he knew what was happeningbut he encouraged the British to just “carry-on” with what they were doing.
In his own words he said, “The relentlessneeds of warfare justified incurring the risk of spreading infection.” You can’t just blame Britain for this, theworld was at war and
countries weren’t about to start quarantining large parts of theirpopulations.
That didn’t mean people weren’t warnedto avoid busy places, and some stores in the USA were at least closed.
Signs hung on the door warning of the spreadof this deadly influenza.
In Japan and Australia people were photographedin the streets wearing face masks.
You can even find news reports from back thenof Boy Scouts handing out leaflets to people they’d seen spitting in the streets of NewYork City.
On those leaflets the words written were,“You are in violation of the Sanitary Code.” But in the USA there was a huge nurse shortage,and those nurses were needed to
take care of influenza sufferers since there were nodrugs to combat the disease.
Instead, they gave soldiers baths, enoughbed rest, aspirin, whiskey, cough syrups, and they gave them clean bedding, and hotsoup.
When you come down with a flu this kind ofcare can be effective.
9,000 trained white nurses were sent to Europeto help the sick soldiers, and thousands more worked in U.S.
But there just weren’t enough of them giventhe size of the problem.
More American soldiers died from flu duringthat war than they did in battle.
There were African American nurses ready togo help the war effort, but because they mostly graduated from small segregated hospital trainingschools they were not utilized where American soldiers and
This was sheer madness, and not somethingthat could ever happen in our modern world.
But it’s just another reason why the SpanishFlu was as deadly as it was.
It was the same in the civilian hospitalsin the U.S., which were also packed with flu victims.
Black nurses for the most part were deniedentrance.
National Institutesof Health wrote about that, “As a result, by August 1918, civilian hospitals were leftwith minimal staff—not nearly enough to meet the demands that would follow when flupatients
flooded into hospital wards.” After the war ended, the American MedicalAssociation wrote that now there was a new challenge in the world and that was infectiousdisease.
It called this the greatest enemy of themall.
At the end of 1918 the cases just kept droppinguntil it seemed the Spanish Flu pandemic was almost over.
One theory is that medical professionals becamebetter at dealing with it, but it’s more likely that the strain of the disease justmutated into something much less lethal.
It wasn’t until mid-way through 1919 thatthe Spanish Flu pandemic was said to be officially over.
Other flu pandemics would come, but none asdeadly as the Spanish Flu.
Maybe even some of you had never heard ofthis devastating outbreak.
The reason it was forgotten of course wasbecause it happened during one of the bloodiest wars in history.
We don’t want to worry you, and there isno doubt that medical science and global collaboration efforts would ensure nothing so deadly inthe world of flu viruses could happen again.
We now have antiviral drugs, antibiotics,respirators, specialized intensive care units and we have information that flows fast andfree.
We can track the spread of a virus and wehave the ability to contain viruses, and we also have people working on vaccines.
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