How a killer flu spread from western Kansas to the world

Over the past few months I’ve read a good bit about the “Spanish” flu outbreak of 1918. On the heels of World War 1, the epidemic killed tens of millions of people around the world. But I did not realize that its genesis (according to the attached article) was actually in the countryside of Kansas.

(From The Wichita Eagle)

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.

Click here for the article.

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