Today begins anniversary of worst flu outbreak in human history

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As bad as the flu is this season after immunologists apparently misdiagnosed what type of virus would affect humans this year, it simply cannot compare with what was happening around here and around the world 100 years ago.

Best-case numbers showed McLennan County health officials reported more than 675 cases of influenza during the first dozen days of December and that number grows daily.

The most recent past spike came in 2014-2015 when McLennan County reported a few more than 900 cases for the whole season, data obtained from the Waco-McLennan County Health District showed.

Local doctors agree there are four to five times as many cases on the books this year as in those recently passed, but as bad as it is, it falls far short of what was happening in January 1918.

A century ago this month the first cases of H1N1 flu were cropping up in places scattered across the globe but initially no one was concerned.

By early March when the first case of flu was officially reported at Ft. Riley Kansas, the outbreak fast as prairie wildfire turned into the deadliest pandemic in human history that over a two-year period claimed tens-of-millions of lives.

Albert Mitchell, an Army company cook, reported to the infirmary at Camp Funston, Kansas, (a Ft. Riley satellite camp) on March 11, 1918, where he complained of a slight headache, a mild sore throat, loss of appetite, aching muscles and a low-grade fever.

The camp doctor ordered Mitchell to spend the day in his bunk.

By mid-day 107 soldiers at the camp had reported themselves ill and within two days that number grew to more than 520.

More realistically the death toll likely ranged between 20 and 50 million but records-keeping at the time was not a forte so no one really is sure.

Between 1918 and 1920 the particularly virulent and deadly strain of influenza claimed more lives than all those, both military and civilian, during World War I.

In fact, many of those military casualties never got out of the country but died at training camps and debarkation stations spread around the U.S. long before they ever saw battle.

And death came to those who normally would have survived such an infection.

Flu normally kills the very young, the very old and those already infirmed, the Centers for Disease Control says.

But in the 1918 pandemic it was young, strong, active people in their 20s, 30s and 40s, who were dying and by the thousands every day.

“I held eight or nine boys in bed while they died with pneumonia; with the flu,” said William Mills Cox in an interview he did with researchers from the Baylor University History Department as part of an oral history project.

Cox, born in Dublin and who went to College Station to study, at the time was working in the campus hospital at Texas A&M University.

“The cadets that had the flu were put in the A&M infirmary, and they started a duty roster of hospital orderlies,” Cox recalled in the March 10, 1981 interview.

“And they put me on the orderly list from five in the afternoon until midnight.

“All they (those who fell ill) had ever had was aspirin. That's all they could do for them, which is a pretty good experience for a 17-year-old kid,” Cox remembered.

“Back then we didn’t really know what the flu was or where it came from or how people got it,” Waco physician Dr. Tim Martindale said in a telephone interview Saturday.

“There was no vaccine and nothing anyone could do.”

Martindale just completed a year as president of the Waco-McLennan County Medical Society and while in that office wrote a monthly paper that spotlighted an interesting medical issue from Waco’s past.

In January 2016 his topic was the worldwide influenza pandemic and how it affected Waco.

Martindale said while the impact the disease had on Central Texas was bad, it was not nearly as terrible as it was elsewhere.

“During 1918 there were 930 cases of Spanish Flu reported at Camp MacArthur and 202 of those soldiers died,” Martindale said.

He added many soldiers who trained at Camp MacArthur died of the flu once they got to the battlefields in France.

Over the same period of time there were between 280 and 500 cases of Spanish flu reported in Waco but outside the military camps.

“I’ve seen pictures of wooden coffins stacked up on the sidewalks along Austin Avenue,” Martindale said.

It was not an uncommon site to see soldiers marching down Austin Avenue, in Waco, escorting a horse-drawn wagon carrying a flag-draped casket to the railroad station for a lonely ride home.

Then in 1920, as fast as it showed up, the flu disappeared.

A report entitled “The Virus”, published by scientists at Stanford University, says: “In the two years that this scourge ravaged the earth, a fifth of the world's population was infected.

“It infected 28-percent of all Americans. An estimated 675,000 Americans died of influenza during the pandemic, ten times as many as in the world war,” Stanford researchers wrote.

Of the U.S. soldiers who died in Europe, half of them fell to the influenza virus and not to the enemy and those battlefield deaths due to flu happened on both sides of the conflict.

In his 2016 paper Martindale wrote: “While 17 million died worldwide due to World War I, between 30 million and 50 million died at the same time of the Spanish Flu that struck in three waves through 1918.

“Waco was not spared. Records are difficult to find due to war, confusion over the flu and the government’s preferring little transparency,” Martindale wrote.

“There were 930 cases of flu at Camp MacArthur and 202 soldiers died. Many others died of flu once they got overseas.

“In the city, between 280 and 500 citizens died of the flu,” Martindale said.

“Local and military doctors cooperated to increase sanitation and quarantine the sick (and) facilities were overrun and coffins stacked up at the roughest times.

At the time, “Waco Mayor Ed McCullough closed schools, theaters and movie houses.

“The efforts and education of physicians and community leaders rendered the flu less severe in Waco than in many other places,” Martindale said.

Generally, Mitchell’s case is believed to be the first identified and reported, but some European scientists say they can trace the first case to an Army hospital in France at about the same time.

The powerful and lethal strain of influenza raced through Army camps where quarters were cramped, populations were large and transient and sanitary conditions were questionable at best and then onto the communities that surrounded the camps.

On June 22, 1972, Texas Supreme Court Justice the late Robert W. Calvert spoke with Drs. Lyle C. Brown and Thomas L. Charlton as part of the Baylor University oral history project and during his talk he recounted his experience with the plague.

“Yes. My sister died in the 1918 influenza epidemic -- quite young—9-years-old, as I recall,” Calvert said.

“Oh, by the way, that was a terrific plague -- that influenza epidemic in 1918.

“If you didn't live through it at the time or haven't read about it, (it affected) people, particularly in a congested area like Army camps, and you could say this home where everybody' s thrown into the melting pot, so-to-speak, lot’s of people died,” Calvert said.

More people died of influenza in a single year than in four-years of the Black Death Bubonic Plague from 1347 to 1351. Known as "Spanish Flu" or "La Grippe" the influenza of 1918-1919 was a global disaster, according to the Stanford study.

Some Waco residents were on the front line of the fight to keep those infected with the virus alive.

“And then I know when the flu came how the sick boys (felt) and folks would ask ‘Please go cheer them up.’ And we did -- We'd go,” Marguerite Cooper recalled in an oral history she did with researchers from Baylor.

Cooper and others would volunteer to visit sick soldiers at the hospital at Camp MacArthur to try to keep their spirits up, she said.

“I escaped having the flu that time, for which I was very thankful,” she said.

“They'd give us a mask (and we’d) go in and maybe say howdy to them and try to help something, send a letter home to someone.

“There were so many things that they need you — they want done, but are not always done for them because there's nobody to do it,” so she and her girlfriends pitched in

Some who lived through the pandemic locally but were spared the illness have in later years questioned why they didn’t get sick.

"I have often thought that the Lord in His providence kept me from having the flu. I used to give a more-earthy explanation than that. People asked me how I avoided it because, oh, people just dropped dead all around from that,” Emmons recalled in an interview for a Baylor oral history project.

Noted Texas folklorist Emmons’ herself graduated from Baylor and later came back for a 10-year stint on the faculty.

“I had my father with me, and I was teaching at Maypearl, Texas, and I remember when I was asked that I said, ‘Oh, well, all I can attribute it to is eating onions and staying happy.’

“But I've often just thought it must have been a providential stroke because I don't know what could have happened if I had had to have the flu right there with my father an invalid and with me, and we were in that little apartment there.

“And it would have been awful for him to have taken the flu from me, don't you see?", Emmons said.