1918 pandemic is cautionary tale for today’s military
By Kelly Kennedy
Times staff writer
The Spanish avian flu that killed 40 million people worldwide in 1918 may have started with an American soldier.
In 1917, doctors diagnosed a cook at Camp Funston — a subpost of Fort Riley, Kan., created to train troops heading off to World War I — with a bad cold. Within weeks, 40 soldiers had died.
“The 89th Division then went to France,” said William McKale, Fort Riley’s museum director. “The theory is they took the bug with them.”
The flu turned into a full-blown pandemic, claiming 40 million people in just 18 months.
John Barry’s book, “The Great Influenza,” made the bedside tables of government leaders — including President Bush — after the latest outbreak of avian, or bird, flu was discovered in 2003. In it, experts theorize that Camp Funston’s cook went home on leave, contracted the flu from a pig on the family farm, then brought it back to camp.
After scientists learned the 1918 flu was also avian, they began to wonder if that pig contracted the virus from a bird.
As more cases of avian flu arise in Turkey — as of Jan. 18, five children had died of it there — scientists fear the same scenario could occur today. And they’re looking back in time to see just how the U.S. military may have contributed to the pandemic.
“It had a real devastating effect,” McKale said. “It took the lives of 900 recruits here. The soldiers were dying at such a rate, and it was so cold, they had the bodies piled outdoors almost like cordwood.”
Military hospitals were overwhelmed as 47,000 soldiers died — about the same as were killed in battle. The United States created 16 training camps to prepare soldiers heading overseas. Those camps proved to be giant petri dishes for first the flu, then the secondary infections, such as pneumonia, that killed so many people.
As in all military training camps, the soldiers lived in close quarters. They ate together, visited the Red Cross together, watched movies together, went to town together, and then went to war packed together in ships.
John N. Bombardt Jr. studied the 1918 pandemic for the Institute for Defense Analyses. His worry: how the avian flu might spread through the world again — from military bases — if terrorists were to get hold of it. He began his research after a 1997 outbreak in Hong Kong was extinguished when the government killed all the chickens.
“What I found was that the training bases were the real hotbeds of disease transmission,” Bombardt said. “This was really, really hard on the military population.
“It was just heart-wrenching what the guys went through,” he said. “One regiment had it really bad, but they immediately shipped to the front. Even though they knew they were sick — they knew they might die — they just kept going.”
In his study, he looked at the ways the military population could spread a flu to the civilian population today. Because soldiers are so mobile, and because they interact with outlying communities, and because they still work and live closely together, he found the risk is great.
“It’s not that we should panic,” he said. “But maybe if we have a better understanding of what happened then, we might better be able to prepare for what’s coming.”