in 1918 a tiny silent killer ravaged the world bioterrorism on a horrifying scale and it was just like Black Death just went around the world wiped out thousands and thousands of people the 1918 influenza was extremely virulent probably the worst infectious disease outbreak ever recorded the Spanish flu spread faster and killed more people in less time than any of the great plagues of history it moves so fast that by the time people realized what was happening it had gone on to the next state the next the next province it didn't seem to matter if you were totally isolated in the middle of the archetype is still getting who could explain this I don't know there was no cure and no explanation for why it came so suddenly and killed so fast now when that was one of the mysteries how is this thing spreading it just seemed to be coming out of nowhere and going and being everywhere at once then just as quickly it was gone and to this day the Spanish Influenza is still one of the great murder mysteries of the 20th century March 11th 1918 Fort Riley an American Forces Base in Kansas a company cooked reports to the base hospital with what seems to be typical symptoms of the flu mild fever sore throat and muscle aches by noon there are 100 more cases within a week 500 military camps are hotbeds of respiratory infectious viruses again for the same reason that you bring people together and you put them in close quarters say open barracks in which everyone 300 men are sleeping in one open room so one person sneezes everyone gets the virus within a matter of days there are other outbreaks thousands of workers at the Ford Motor Company in Detroit are sent home with the same symptoms in California 500 prisoners at San Quentin come down with the flu but still no alarm bells and there's a precedent for it if you say plague everybody says my god plague if you say influenza everybody says well not to worry sinful winter take an aspirin and go to bed but there's something different about this flu people are not only getting sick they're dying that spring 46 soldiers are buried at Fort Riley it seemed like somebody would would get start to feel a little bit ill and then hours or maybe a day later they couldn't breathe there your skin would turned dark because they couldn't get enough oxygen to their blood and it was essentially drown their lung their lungs would fill with fluid then just as quickly as it arrived the sickness seems to disappear the first world war is raging in Europe and that summer tens of thousands of American soldiers are crowding onto troop ships for the voyage overseas no one realizes that many are carrying something far deadlier than their weapons a tiny silent stowaway I don't think anybody's ever figured out the numbers but certainly there are hundreds and hundreds of soldiers who died on those ships who might wallet survived if they'd just been left wherever they were I've been on a troopship it was stacked six high and the bunks kind of imagine the worst place to be with a respiratory disease within weeks the Fort Riley sickness surfaces among the combat troops in the trenches the virus passes first from the Americans to the British French and Commonwealth troops and then effortlessly crosses no-man's land to infect the German army so you bring a virus that's infectious for one person to another in two populations where people are stressed and then severely crowded they're crowded on troop ships that crowded in trenches they're crowded in barracks and so you have the virus can just really efficiently spread from person to person so entire company's entire armies would come down with the flu within just a couple of days in no time the virus has jumped the channel into britain and crossed the mountains into italy when it arrives in Spain the epidemic is reported in the public press for the first time in a strange twist of history this is what gives the flu its name in Europe nobody was talking about it because of wartime secrecy but Spain was unaligned at that time and they worse they think this it was reported so people said oh there's this Spanish flu because that was like the only country that was admitting they had it because Spain had influenza just like everybody else did what publicized it let the world know about it so by the process of elimination of course Spaniards got hung this title hung around the neck of the Spanish flu as it spreads through Europe the virus mutates grows stronger and more deadly but we had in 1918 was an influenza virus that was extremely fit and by that I mean that all of the proteins of the virus worked extremely well together that the virus was extremely well tuned to to be infectious to people to be highly transmissible to go from person to person and to replicate and make copies of itself a very high copy number very deep in the lung but this new enemy is overshadowed by the fighting in Europe North America is preoccupied with recruiting drives and bond rallies to feed the war effort in the late summer of 1918 sick and wounded troops begin returning to North America many carry inside them a tiny killer unlike anything the world has ever seen at military camps all over North America men begin dropping like flies when you read what they said it was it was such Elling you almost couldn't believe it they described in a camp Devens which was near Boston one of the first places where the flu showed up that the body bore dying so fast that she couldn't even get into the morgue the bodies were stacked like cordwood and you had to step over the bodies just to get in they said it took special trains to carry away the dead but some camps soldiers in the prime of life are dying at the rate of 100 a day one anonymous doctor at Camp Devin's is overwhelmed by the carnage these men start with what appears to be an attack of like grip or influenza and when brought to the hospital they very rapidly developed the most vicious type of pneumonia that has ever been seen we used to go down to the morgue and look at the boys laid out in long rows it beats any sight they ever had in France after a battle medical science has worked wonders on other killer diseases smallpox and Thrax and meningitis but against this epidemic it is helpless no one understands what causes it how it spreads or how to stop it they didn't know what the hell's going on they didn't know anything about about viruses they were looking for a needle in the haystack they didn't know there was a needle and they didn't know what a haystack was so they spun their wheels wildly nothing worked it was one of those things that's just sort of a spreading like wildfire so quickly no one could even understand how it was doing it most doctors conclude incorrectly that the culprit is bacteria all they know for certain is that whatever it is it attacks the most unlikely victims and kills them quickly young healthy 25 year olds 30 year-olds would get the flu and then die in just a couple of days and the way they died was actually extremely unusual and not typical of influenza viruses in general what happened is that their lungs would basically fill with edema fluid or blood and they would literally drown in their own fluid or blood often in as early as one or two days after the onset of symptoms the virus has swept through the military population on both sides of the Atlantic but in September 1918 the killer flu drifts out of the army camps and is loose in the world by the fall of 1918 Spanish influenza has rounded the globe in just four months and goes from epidemic to pandemic it has already killed tens of thousands of people in its first wave now it returns to North America with greater fury it arrives in Canada in September hitting the big port towns first the first civilian outbreak was in a college in that Quebec Victoriaville and two of the boys became ill and followed immediately after by 398 more so the the poor of heads of this scored at a complete loss and they shipped them all off across the province if they were well enough to stand and presumably they carried the food germ with them in a matter of weeks flu is everywhere across the province thousands of cases crowd the hospital's infecting nurses doctors and other patients in Montreal alone the flu kills more than 3,000 people I can remember very very clearly for example at that time when the flu that if people seem to be dying all over the place I I mean death seemed to be very commonplace Tom Kieran's was only five years old when the flu hit Montreal and every day on his street there were two or three funerals but I can remember playing with my my cousin and and suddenly I was told that he was dead and he was going to be buried returning soldiers some of whom had survived for years on the battlefields of the great war now fall prey to an unseen killer Geraldine wake Lee's grandfather is one of them he came back here to work it was an orderly I guess in the hospital he helping to take care of these men and he just picked up this disease from the men he was taken care of by the time her grandmother goes to see him in the hospital he is already deathly sick when he went in the hospital I don't think he expected to come out because he wrote a will at that time willing his farm in Ontario to his wife and he'd never he never saw her again he told her not to come back because people were dropping dead in the streets and he didn't want her there with the children eight days later her grandfather is dead there was this terrible irony of servicemen who who had experienced just appalling conditions during the war and dreadful wounds and came home and got flu and died now that that was the ultimate irony wasn't it in Halifax the epidemic is being fueled by the war effort American troop ships on route to Europe stop here to unload thousands of soldiers too sick to make the crossing they fill the local hospitals and further spread the flu virus I remember father coming home one day and he said I think we're in for trouble there is a lot of bacteria that they figure has come in on some ships during the war time and it's incubated here and it's been other places on the seaboard every member of Eleanor Allison's family catches the flu that fall but they are luckier than most and all survived I thought I was going to die I really did I've had flu since that and I can't explain it to you but the fever was different it engulfed Jo it from head to foot you just were burning up absolutely burning up and nothing I can remember mother changing my nightgown several times in the run of the day quarantine signs begin to appear on front doors all over Halifax but I looked up and down the street and it practically everybody on the street was quarantined because it was highly contagious but nothing seems to stop or even slow the spread of the deadly virus it is so contagious that even the most isolated communities are not immune the sickness comes to the native village of OCAC from the Labrador coast on a supply boat the harmony was one of the ships that came from Europe with supplies and she had brought a supply of I guess the things people would need for the winter and had left late in the fall and apparently the story that my mother told me was that there was somebody sick on that ship under harmony and this is where they think that the flu came from from England it took only a few hours to unload the stores and it was gone but that crewman had left something else behind influenza flashes through the village in a matter of days Beatriz Watts mother often told her the story of what happened in the remote native village she told us about how she woke up one morning and her stepfather was lying by the stove where he had been out bringing in wood to light the fire and she spoke to him but he didn't respond he just didn't move then she ran to her mom and my mother was still in bed sleeping and she said she called her her mother to tell her mother that her stepfather was just lying there she didn't know what was wrong with him and when she test touch her mom her mom didn't move she she had died in her sleep and she still had the baby her youngest baby my mother's youngest brother on her breast and then so she said she took the baby away she was only nine years old and and I took the baby away from my mother and bundled him up in and she ran to her grandmother's to tell her grandmother about her stepfather and her mom just as she was getting to her grandmother's house they were bringing her grandmother out dead and one of her aunt's in the village of 330 people 280 died of the flu Reverend Walter parrot a Moravian missionaries a diary what had been a happy and prosperous village was in a few days wiped out whole families died without being able to send for help one little girl the only survivor in a household lived on in solitude with her dead parents and brothers and sisters around her for weeks she lived like this the flu flashes through native villages all over Labrador Reverend Henry Gordon another missionary harnesses a team of sled dogs to bring food supplies to the isolated settlements paradise once the largest settlement in the bay is a veritable City of the Dead many of the people are still sick not a sign of life to be seen anywhere the first place I made for was Mountaineer Cove there were once four families living there I found the remains one all the rest were dead Edward party is one of five children Reverend Gordon found orphaned in one of the houses gonna be there forever she's going to be the apostle move on and then then she come that there was funding from there no Saturday from this you come back come back some day and sit on that swell a problem you know and she convenience of being leaned on the table I sitting on table still that hill that on the floor dead yeah told you to click on file so on those nano forever compelling and further in the porch just boy the Gucci all of us and whom that's the best but all your affair yeah leave it with anybody sensitively good sir alright cost six month six six out there you go again never yeah together the survivors and the missionary take on the awful task of burying the dead the frozen ground and their own weakness prevented the digging of graves they buried the bodies in the sea through a grave like hole cut in the ice and set fire to the deserted houses to get rid of the infection in a grisly turn of events the survivors are forced to destroy hundreds of sled dogs with no one left to feed them they have begun to run in savage packs they just went wild dashed through the windows of the houses and pulled down the doors fell to eating human flesh in some cases they attacked the living who were not strong enough to beat them off in just two weeks the Spanish flu had wiped out 1/3 of the Inuit population in Labrador the village of OCAC is abandoned and never resettled people didn't seem to want to go back there although it was a really good place for hunting and fishing and you know to me for making a living and just surviving I guess nobody wanted to go back they just closed it down and left by October 1918 virtually every town and village in North America is under siege they begin to look like ghost towns afraid to venture out people shut themselves in their houses and businesses are forced to close their doors theaters suffered and schools even churches there was one point where room where the Roman Catholic priest and I think this was in Montreal walked along the street and blessed people because they were not able to meet in one big place in Montreal the flu was killing people at the rate of a hundred and sixty five a day in Toronto a special trolley car is adapted to carry coffins to the cemetery because the hearses can't keep up in Philadelphia 700 people died in a single day in October Victor Vaughn the Surgeon General of the US Army concludes if the epidemic continues its mathematical rate of acceleration civilization could easily disappear from the face of the earth in a matter of weeks by October 1918 the Spanish flu is spreading with breathtaking speed across the Atlantic Ocean and through North America Canadian soldiers stand a better chance of surviving the trenches of the Western Front than surviving an attack of the flu at one point there were 10,000 servicemen sick here and something like 49,000 in in Britain some enormous number and the people who have who nursed them took over schools and conferences temporary places and they said sometimes they could hardly get along the rows between the cause to the doctors and nurses it is an enormous murder mystery they cannot understand how it spreads and why this particular flu was so lethal most all those who died the majority were people who got secondary bacterial infections and we take ten days and ten days two weeks to to die but there were a very significant number of people who had on Tuesday come down with the disease and Thursday be dead and most disturbing is the flues choice of victims usually influenza kills the very old and the very young but not this time there are a lot of people who died of flu every year but they are not young healthy people and that's one of the mysteries of the flu why would it kill the young and the healthy and and not and of course it also had its usual victims but the big the big group that we're dying were the young and healthy medical science is handicapped by 1918 technology viruses are unknown and microscopes are too crude to see them most doctors conclude it is a bacterium that causes the flu but they are fighting the wrong enemy I think that what you have is a virus that spreads very efficiently person-to-person through respiratory spread that is little droplets of water that are coughed out or sneezed out of one person and briefed in to another person and these viruses spread very efficiently no matter what the medical community is grasping for solutions to a problem and cannot understand faced with an inexplicable killer governments at every level are in chaos they have no answers but they must do something anything there weren't any vaccines there weren't achilles and the only things that they could come up with were absurd like wearing gauze masks shutting down the schools and churches so people wouldn't breathe on each other I saw pictures of whole schools and staffs of banks and insurance companies everyone wearing a mask was quite ghostly looking in Canada a federal Department of Health does not even exist yet provinces and municipalities take matters into their own hands some ban public meetings of any kind others impose fines or jail terms for sneezing or spitting in the street every day there are rumors of some new Wonder cure and huxter's prey on people's fears to sell everything from galoshes to Ovaltine there's a commercial reaction to any sort of crisis and certain medications were produced and peddled that were you know guarantee you recovery from the disease you won't even get to disease they're all absolutely totally useless equally worthless of the dozens of folk remedies that circulate bags of mothballs or camphor worn around the neck goose grease castor oil or turpentine they sprinkled sulfur in their shoes they carried pans of sulfur through the house lit that was to purify the air some people said a salt herring tied around his throat would carry they mix sulphur with molasses and made sulfur and the last kind of a a light yellow colored but tasted pretty good and actually you could eat that with innocent with a spoon or a piece of bread another remedy that I was told about let said about dipping a needle into the scent gland of a skunk and stirring the needle around in a glass of water I'm drinking the water but nothing slows the epidemic by mid-october the flu has spread from east to west cutting a swath through North America buildings everywhere are commandeered and university auditoriums schools church basements become temporary hospital wards in Toronto ribbons begin appearing on the front doors of houses all over the city a gray sash for the loss of an adult white for the death of a child it was a very random thing it might hit one house in a city block and no others or it might take almost all the houses her sis went up and down the streets and one woman talked about hearing the cart rattling it made it sounded sort of like the French Revolution they were carrying away the the dead in some places the death toll rises so fast that bodies must be buried in mass graves one observer writes the fear was so thick that even a child could feel it every day there was someone we knew in the obituary columns we got so we didn't even mourn Armistice Day November 11th 1918 a sense of relief sweeps over the world as news comes that the Great War is finally over all over North America and Europe there are victory parades and celebrations in the streets I can remember five years old looking from our top Randa on the third floor at 195 Laporte Avenue looking down on the street and my mother and my aunt Lena both young woman relatively young women at the time linking their arms and dancing together in the street there was such joy that the war at last was over but there is no peace in the war against the flu in November 1918 in Ontario alone another 3,000 people died from the virus one woman remembers said at the end of the war Armistice Day was so much celebration and her her mother and four of her brothers and sisters had been ill with flu on the day of the celebration she and her father were at the graveside of her mother they could hear the bells ringing she found this very very hard to to take it is a cruel irony that the Armistice actually speeds the spread of influenza people ignore the ban on public gatherings rush into the streets and hug and kiss infecting each other Canadian soldiers are coming home at the rate of 3500 a month as they fan out across the country the silent killer travels with them men coming from off the ships but very often they maybe didn't have active food but they were incubating it so if they got too faint say they got to Winnipeg off the train everybody was so happy to see them and then they go into the city and spread it around the epidemic spreads West following the rail lines some towns refused to allow the trains to stop others order health inspectors to check passengers before they're permitted into the station but still the flu spreads through the prairies and Alberta across the Rockies all the way to the Pacific coast you can protect yourself from either AIDS or Ebola you have to be in direct contact with body fluids and we know how to prevent them we know how to protect ourselves from them and what tuberculosis is to you can you can quarantine the sec and you can prevent the spread of it there's no way that anybody could think up to prevent the spread of this flu so-called flu vaccines begin to appear on the market and thousands of people rushed to their doctors to get inoculated but the injections of the product of nothing more than guesswork I talked to dr. in San Francisco men in his eighties who was producing vaccines and putting them in people's arms in 1918 and he cheerfully told me I asked him what was in it you say was a soup we took sputum and strained it and punched in into people's arms people's arms get really hurt which was encouraging because you knew something had been done but the vaccines are no more effective than the gauze masks and home remedies about all society can do is bury the dead and care for the sick thousands of volunteers offer their help to meet what seems an endless demand any any woman who could help by changing beds doing laundry cooking whatever was asked to come forward and they were wonderful breakdowns of the social barriers there were matrons who had never come any closer to household duties and telling their cooks what to do or instructing their maids suddenly found themselves changing beds and feeding people washing floors it was quite remarkable by Christmas 1918 the hospitals are overflowing temporary treatment shelters are full and health officials are at their wit's end then just as it seems nothing can stop the flu it begins to retreat on its own towns and cities begin to see a sharp decline in the number of cases and newspapers report that death rates are dropping dramatically doctors are as perplexed by its departure as they were by its arrival at the 1918 influenza was a big medical mystery here was the largest influenza pandemic in history possibly the worst infectious disease outbreak of all human history with about 40 million deaths 500 million cases and yet no one knew anything about the virus directly it will be another decade and a half before medical researchers discover the flu virus but in 1918 all anyone can understand clearly is the carnage it is caused 50,000 Canadians have died nearly as many as have been killed during the whole of the First World War in the united states so many died from the flu that for 1918 the average life expectancy drops by 13 years they killed more Americans than died in battle in World War 1 World War 2 Korea and Vietnam combined and one person at the time wrote something which I thought was really interesting he said that this virus demonstrated the inferiority of human weapons and destroying human life almost every country in the world has suffered half a million died in Russia 375,000 in Italy at least 5 million in India it's estimated that the 1918 pandemic has killed at least 40 million people worldwide but most experts agree the numbers are probably much higher there's a lot of underestimation of the number of deaths amputee understated mobility mobility rates which are always understated anyway because all the people get the disease have no sign of it other people get the disease and keep on cranking along anyway but don't turn themselves in as sick so rule of thumb would be that the death rates and the morbidity rates in 1918 now practically every place understated not overstated even by conservative estimates the 1918 influenza killed more people in a shorter period of time than any disease in history and no one yet knows why it was so deadly the records indicate there is another pandemic coming the question is when medical researchers are still struggling to unravel the mystery of the 1918 influenza it is not simply an academic exercise unless they can understand what happened in the past they cannot prepare for the future new influenza viruses will emerge and I think it's very likely that a new pandemic viruses will will reappear since we don't yet know one where the 1918 flu came from and to why specifically it was so lethal we can't apply those lessons to the future in 1997 two separate scientific expeditions sent out to find tissue samples containing genetic material of the 1918 virus the first traveled to a remote island in Norway where seven coal miners who died of the flu had been buried scientists were hoping their bodies might have been preserved in the permafrost but unfortunately for this project the the bodies had slowly risen up during this eighty year period so that they were just below the surface of the ground and because of that they had repeatedly thought and refrozen and so there were there were no soft tissues remaining in these bodies and so there was no no way to recover fragments of the bars the second expedition to Alaska was luckier here a retired pathologist Johann Holton found the bodies of four Spanish flu victims that had been solidly frozen for 80 years tissue samples were taken from one of the bodies that still contain genetic material of the virus but scientists are still a long way from unlocking the secret but it's going to take us years because the virus genetic material was broken up into these teeny tiny fragments and so we have to isolate each tiny fragment one at a time generated sequence and then in a sense put the whole thing together like putting together a puzzle or a mosaic every year influenza causes 20,000 deaths in the United States alone but if a virus with the killing power of the 1918 flu appeared again the speed of modern travel would produce a devastating death toll isn't ships that take a week to cross the Atlantic now and 2 weeks or whatever describes the Pacific we're hours away from it any spot on the globe now so if anything like this exploded again they would travel immensely fast I asked him for all the time could it happen again because it's it's it's the question on everybody's mind and the answer I always get is yeah it really could you can't discount this because if you flu viruses are always changing that's why we have a new flu season every year they're always mutating we're not the only species that gets infected so they mutate other places and they mix and match and scramble their genes all the studies shows severe flu epidemics break out on a regular cycle and many scientists predict that the world is overdue for another attack much of the world's population lives in the conditions not significantly different than they were in 1918 so I think if it influenza pandemic of the magnitude of 1918 were to reoccur I think that we would be looking at very similar percentages of illness and death which is very depressing and also very scary it's sobering thought influenza is so transmissible that it will sweep around the world and you know okay can't do it again tomorrow I can do it again today the only way to stop influenza from moving across the world is people got to stop breathing or I'll crawl into holes and stay there and that's not going to happen
