DEADLIER BATTLE

IN 1918, US OFFICIALS IGNORED KILLER FLU CRISIS TO FIGHT WAR

First came the Great War. Then came something far deadlier: the 1918 flu.

The influenza pandemic that broke out 100 years ago was far more virulent than this year’s nasty flu season. Dubbed the Spanish Flu, it is estimated to have killed 50 million to 100 million worldwide. More than 675,000 Americans perished from the disease — a number that dwarfs the 117,000 U.S. service members who died in World War I.

But fighting the war took precedence over fighting the flu, which claimed most of its victims during a devastating 10-week period between September and December.

One of the first warning signs came in August 1918 when 60 sailors in Boston went to the hospital saying they felt asif they “had been beaten all over with a club.”

But a more frightening report arrived the next month from Camp Devens, 30 miles west of Boston, where 45,000 men were packed into an encampment built for 35,000 troops.

“I saw hundreds of young stalwart men in uniform coming into the wards of the hospital. Every bed was full, yet others crowded in,” reported Victor Vaughan, dean of the University of Michigan School of Medicine and director of the surgeon general’s Office of Communicable Disease. “The faces wore a bluish cast; a cough brought up the bloodstained sputum.”

Although Vaughan and William Henry Welch, a famed pathologist from Johns Hopkins, recommended that no one be transferred from the base, the war effort was considered too critical to stifle troop movement.

[PHOTO BY EDWARD A. “DOC” ROGERS, LIBRARY OF CONGRESS/AP] BELOW: In this 1918 photo made available by the Library of Congress, volunteer nurses from the American Red Cross tend to influenza patients in the Oakland Municipal Auditorium, used as a temporary hospital.

[PHOTO BY CYNTHIA GOLDSMITH, CDC/AP] This 2005 electron microscope image made available by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows re-created 1918 influenza virions that were collected from a 1918 cell culture.

[PHOTO PROVIDED BY LIBRARY OF CONGRESS/AP] BELOW: In this 1918-1919 photo made available by the Library of Congress, a conductor checks to see if potential passengers are wearing masks in Seattle. During the influenza epidemic, masks were required for all passengers.