All this, plus recent reports of avian flu spreading through Southeast Asian chicken flocks, reaching the United States, and beginning to infect humans, makes John M. Barry's "The Great Influenza," a sobering account of the 1918 flu epidemic, compelling and timely.
The 1918 pandemic took a staggering toll -- worldwide, 50 million to 100 million lives; in the United States, 675,000. More people died from mid-September to early December in 1918 than have died of AIDS in its 24-year scourge, Barry notes.
When the flu struck in 1918, it was killing, Barry writes, "in some new and awful way." As an internal Red Cross report put it, the flu spread "a fear and panic . . . akin to the terror of the Middle Ages regarding the Black Plague." Barry's descriptions of the disease's ravages are gruesome.
Barry's is the second major book dealing with the 1918 pandemic in the past five years. The earlier one -- which, curiously, Barry does not cite -- by New York Times science reporter Gina Kolata, focused on the still ongoing scientific research into its cause.
Barry, on the other hand, is a historian -- his book "Rising Tide," an account of the 1927 Mississippi flood, won the Francis Parkman Prize -- and the great strengths of his latest book lie in its accounts of the epidemic's origin, its devastating spread through US Army training camps, and its impact on civilian life.
While many flu viruses, this season's included, originate in Asia, Barry offers a persuasive argument that the 1918 epidemic began, mysteriously, in rural Haskell County, Kansas, early that year. "Evidence further suggests," Barry writes, "that this virus traveled east across the state to a huge army base."
At Camp Devens in Ayer, as an Army report put it, "the influenza . . . occurred as an explosion." On a single day in September, 1,543 men reported ill with influenza.
The situation was similar at other camps -- at Camp Custer in Michigan, 2,800 troops reported ill in one day; at Camp Grant in Illinois, more than 100 men died in a single day in October, and the camp's commander killed himself as the toll passed 500.
