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 Drake visited 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.
Was Gitchell patient zero?
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.
All hell was about to break loose.
Before we get to just how devastating this flu was, in view of what we’ve just told
you, you are probably wondering why it was called the “Spanish flu” and not the “Kansas”
flu.
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 in France.
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, or originated in Europe, and that discussion
is still going on.
The reason we call it the Spanish Flu is merely 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 wasn’t true.
The name seems to have stuck, though.
It should be called, “Not The Spanish Flu.”
This deadly flu travelled fast, and it’s estimated that around 27 percent 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 50 million 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 their 40s were the worst hit.
To put that into perspective for you, in 1917 the 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 percent of the country’s population.
In the Dutch East Indies around 1.5 million people died.
390,000 Japanese people succumbed to the deadly disease.
In Britain 250,000 flu deaths were reported and 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 percent 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 South Pacific called the Lau and Yasawa islands,
had no cases, as did Marajo island on Brazil’s Amazon delta.
Some parts of Alaska were also spared of the horrors of the pandemic.
We’re not going to spend an entire show on the death toll estimates from all over
the world because that would take up all the time, and we are sure by now you understand
that the Spanish Flu wreaked havoc across all four corners of the globe and was one
of the most terrifying things that happened in the 20th century.
Let’s talk about how it spread so fast and why it couldn’t be contained.
Well, for one thing, infected soldiers living in close quarters in often terrible conditions
didn’t help matters, neither did the fact those soldiers were travelling far and wide.
The war was a “world” war and it involved many countries, some with empires and many
colonies.
It’s believed that there was a first wave of the flu, but the deadlier second wave spread
so fast because of wartime troop movements.
This is how one historian put it, “The entire military industrial complex of moving lots
of men and material in crowded conditions was certainly a huge contributing factor in
the ways the pandemic spread.”
This first wave was not so bad, more like a seasonal flu one might get these days.
But that second wave was fearsome, especially when reports came in that young healthy people
had come down with a fever and then were dead within 24 hours.
How could that happen?
Well, in some cases the patient would first have a very high fever.
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 what was happening.
Some British doctors said the state of the deceased lungs were so bad that chemical warfare
had to be to blame.
We now know that there is a condition known as “cytokine explosion.”
This is basically an immune response from the body to help a person when he or she has
been attacked by a virus.
But there can be an over-reaction, and when the body sends too many of the messenger proteins
called cytokines this can create an explosion.
The downside to this is inflammation and that fluid build-up in the lungs we just mentioned.
This might also be the reason mostly people in their 20s to 40s died, because their really
strong immune systems caused the biggest storms of cytokine.
Their bodies over-reacted.
Now let’s let you listen to the words of a 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 distressing cough brings up the blood stained sputum.
In the morning the dead bodies are stacked about the morgue like cord wood.”
Back then doctors didn’t know what the virus was, and they weren’t equipped with electron
microscopes to study the virus.
These days doctors do have those things and they know how to isolate a virus, and because
of that they can look at its genetic sequence and then attempt to create antiviral drugs
and hopefully come up with a vaccine.
In 1918, when all the troops from around the world were mixing together and going back
to their hometowns, there was no such technology.
On top of that, when people showed early signs of the disease and moved about in public it
was hard to test them and so they weren’t quarantined as they would be now.
Humans are now very good at estimating where the virus will spread and so can isolate various
places.
Now there is something called “contact tracing”, which basically means health authorities looking
at who has been close to someone who has been infected and then testing those people to
see if they got it.
The healthcare workers now will wear protective equipment and the public will have daily updated
knowledge on what they can do to stay away from the disease.
or at least do the right thing to reduce their chances of getting it.
None of that happened back then, and there was no way workers could just choose to work
at home or people could go on the Internet to find the latest news.
As we said, most media during the war, including that of the U.S., the U.K. and France were
not reporting the spread of the deadly disease because that didn’t look good for the war
effort.
Spain did most of the media reporting, and if you hadn’t done your research you’d
think this flu originated there.
We should say this, though, the authorities did know that people spread disease to other
people.
That much was obvious to anyone.
Europeans and most of the rest of the world knew all about pandemics, and that infected
people should be kept away from healthy people.
In Britain during the war the Chief Medical Officer of the Local Government Board, Sir
Arthur Newsholme, knew very well that a lockdown could help prevent further spread of the disease,
but that was out of the question because of the war effort.
Those munitions factories and many other industries could not just stop.
Research shows he knew what was happening but he encouraged the British to just “carry-on”
with what they were doing.
In his own words he said, “The relentless needs of warfare justified incurring the risk
of spreading infection.”
You can’t just blame Britain for this, the world was at war and countries weren’t about
to start quarantining large parts of their populations.
That didn’t mean people weren’t warned to avoid busy places, and some stores in the
USA were at least closed.
Signs hung on the door warning of the spread of this deadly influenza.
In Japan and Australia people were photographed in the streets wearing face masks.
You can even find news reports from back then of Boy Scouts handing out leaflets to people
they’d seen spitting in the streets of New York 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 no drugs to combat the disease.
Instead, they gave soldiers baths, enough bed rest, aspirin, whiskey, cough syrups,
and they gave them clean bedding, and hot soup.
When you come down with a flu this kind of care can be effective.
9,000 trained white nurses were sent to Europe to help the sick soldiers, and thousands more
worked in U.S. military camps.
But there just weren’t enough of them given the size of the problem.
More American soldiers died from flu during that war than they did in battle.
There were African American nurses ready to go help the war effort, but because they mostly
graduated from small segregated hospital training schools they were not utilized where American
soldiers and civilians had the flu.
This was sheer madness, and not something that could ever happen in our modern world.
But it’s just another reason why the Spanish Flu was as deadly as it was.
It was the same in the civilian hospitals in the U.S., which were also packed with flu
victims.
Black nurses for the most part were denied entrance.
This is what the U.S. National Institutes of Health wrote about that, “As a result,
by August 1918, civilian hospitals were left with minimal staff—not nearly enough to
meet the demands that would follow when flu patients flooded into hospital wards.”
After the war ended, the American Medical Association wrote that now there was a new
challenge in the world and that was infectious disease.
It called this the greatest enemy of them all.
At the end of 1918 the cases just kept dropping until it seemed the Spanish Flu pandemic was
almost over.
One theory is that medical professionals became better at dealing with it, but it’s more
likely that the strain of the disease just mutated into something much less lethal.
It wasn’t until mid-way through 1919 that the Spanish Flu pandemic was said to be officially
over.
Other flu pandemics would come, but none as deadly as the Spanish Flu.
It’s actually sometimes called the “forgotten pandemic”.
Maybe even some of you had never heard of this devastating outbreak.
The reason it was forgotten of course was because it happened during one of the bloodiest
wars in history.
We don’t want to worry you, and there is no doubt that medical science and global collaboration
efforts would ensure nothing so deadly in the 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 and free.
We can track the spread of a virus and we have the ability to contain viruses, and we
also have people working on vaccines.
Now let’s have a look at something arguably even scarier, and told in the style of our
amazing I AM channel.
This story is a must watch, “I AM A Black Death (The Plague) Doctor.”
To compliment that show, you should also take a look at this, “What Made The Black Death
So Deadly & Who Were The Plague Doctors.”