FLU: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus that Caused It. - Brief Article - Review - book review

By USACMLS Command Historian, Dr. Burton Wright

FLU: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus that Caused It, Gina Kolata. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1999.

The year 1918 has a uniqueness not associated with the successful ending of World War I. Human history is riddled with different kinds of plagues and disasters. Diseases caused some of them. The great and often unknown pandemic of 1918 killed an estimated 20 to 30 million people worldwide.

Few individuals die pleasantly, and those who died from this epidemic died most unpleasantly. A total of 500,000 Americans died during this time--15,000 in New York City alone. In Alaska, where the Eskimos were among the hardest hit, whole villages perished in just a few weeks. The stunned survivors could only bury the dead and try to get on with their lives.

Newspapers in the United States, in their usual search for the truth, stated that the Germans had loosed the plague on the United States through either Bayer Aspirin[R] (a German Company) or a camouflaged ship that entered the Boston harbor and spread the virus.

In many cities of the United States, people cut themselves off from any association with their friends and others. Why?--to avoid contracting the disease. Major parts of families were wiped out one by one. People were fearful and spent much time praying to God to deliver them from the disease.

To this day, no one knows what strain of flu caused the disease. If you enjoy mysteries--a search for the ultimate truth to the disease--then you've got to read FLU: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus that Caused It by Gina Kolata, a science reporter for the New York Times. It is a well-written and well-researched book that reads like both an adventure novel and a mystery like those written by Agatha Christie.

This book begins with a snapshot of the effects of the disease and how it affected thousands of soldiers in camps all over the United States as well as cities and towns. Ms. Kolata leaves no doubt in the reader's mind of the horrible nature of the plague and takes no more than two chapters to tell this story. She doesn't need to go into great detail because the story has fully been told in other books. The "guts" of the book is not the flu but the search for it.

The author shows how the plague suddenly stopped and never reoccurred. She introduces Dr. Johan V. Hultin from Sweden who later settled in the United States and became a very successful pathologist. As early as 1950, he conducted serious research to acquire fluid from the lungs of plague victims to possibly obtain strains of the live virus. He was unsuccessful.

Why? Dr. Hutlin and others, such as Jeffrey Taubenberger who took up the search, wanted to map the genetic structure of one of the greatest killers of all time. Several scientists who performed in-depth studies of the 1918 disease believed that this flu killed about 40 million in India alone. The standard numbers for deaths attributed to the 1918 strain are in the range of 20 to 30 million. If new information about the 1918 flu is accurate, the true number of deaths could be much higher. If, for example, 40 million alone died in India, then the total deaths worldwide could number up to 100 million, which would make this the greatest killer of all time.

If the live virus could be found and mapped, then humankind would be protected if the virus returned again to plague this planet. That is why those people mentioned in the book have spent many years attempting to unlock the secrets of the 1918 flu.

Chapter 5 deals with the mid-1970's flap over a particular strain of killer flu that broke out in and around Fort Dix, New Jersey. A number of physicians were afraid that the Fort Dix strain of flu was a potential repeat of the 1918 pandemic and that the nation could expect it to hit heavy the next flu season. Alarms went off to Washington, and President Gerald Ford interjected the government in the fight when he tasked the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare to develop a vaccine to immunize the entire nation. President Ford and his advisors had noble intentions, but a small problem arose. The vaccine had a tendency to trigger Guillain-Barre' Syndrome--a potentially fatal disease for some people.

After long and sometimes bitter debates, the government forged ahead with the vaccination program, and true to form, people died of the Guillain-Barre' Syndrome. This exposed the government to litigation, and a hurricane of suits hit the government--no doubt pleasing the Trial Lawyers Association. In the final few chapters, the author summarizes what we know about the disease and recent attempts to discover the live tissue in the corpses of long-deceased individuals. We now have live strains of the disease, but so far, science cannot map it accurately enough to chart its genetic structure. Some of the best scientific minds in the world have attempted to not only chart the disease but also to understand how it spread so far so fast.

The important reason for reading this excellent book can be found in the ending sentences:

"Perhaps we grow almost smug about influenza, that most quotidian of infections, a new plague is now gathering deadly force. Except this time we stand armed with a better understanding of the past to better survive the next pandemic."

This, if nothing else, should cause concern about the possibilities of the flu. We cannot be overconfident. We could become a reincarnation of the 1918 flu, which could devastate the United States and not destroy a single man-made object. Small towns could be intact, but deserted. It happened once, and it can happen again.

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