When are we going to change the name of the 1918 H1N1 Virus from Spanish flue? ( Archived) (26)

In response to: SimonLSAdelaide, South Australia Australia14 posts
oh, you mean flu. It didn't proliferate in swine or pigs. When you mention the 1918 flu I must presume you mean the flu virus that first presented at the end of 1916 after the Somme offensive. I'd say you need to study a bit more history before you make public statements: other knowledgeable people will also point out your inconsistencies in historical facts

In response to: Ground Zero in one of the world’s deadliest influenza pandemics started quietly, inconspicuously.

It was winter, 100 years ago. And it was here, in Kansas.

The virus began on the windswept Kansas prairie, where dirt-poor farm families struggled to do daily chores — slopping pigs, feeding cattle, horses, and chickens, living in primitive, cramped, uninsulated quarters.

It’s not known whether it started in the pigs or chickens or birds flying overhead. But it spread to young farmers who, drafted for World War I, reported for duty at Fort Riley.

The virus mutated along the way as men coughed and sneezed, spreading germs in Army barracks, then on trains across the nation and on ships to Europe. Within six to nine months, the 1918 influenza pandemic had killed at least 20 million people worldwide. Some reports said 40 million.

No one knows for sure what farm, what family may have first fallen ill. The community was most likely Santa Fe, now a ghost town in Haskell County, says Darlene Groth, curator at Haskell County Historical Society in Sublette.

What is known is that a Kansas country doctor — Dr. Loring Miner, who practiced in Haskell County — became concerned when he noticed this three-day flu wasn’t typical. It was an “influenza of the severe type,” he wrote, and hit young, strong and otherwise healthy people the hardest. He was the first to report to Public Health Reports —a publication of the U.S. Public Health Service — that this flu was a killer.

Dr. Miner could not have known that a perfect storm of circumstances was developing to rapidly spread the virus around the world. At any point, it could have lost its potency. But it didn’t — it kept building in strength like a wildfire each time large groups of people were forced into crowded situations in geographic centers around the world.