Subject: Bookshelf: A Disease Worse Than World War I 
Date: Published: 1/24/90 (110 lines)
Source: Wall Street Journal. Copyright Dow Jones & Co. Inc.

    LEISURE & ARTS -- Bookshelf:
    A Disease Worse Than World War I
    ----
    By David Shribman

    Here we have a book about the flu.  This is not a new book,
 mind you, but one that was written more than a dozen years
 ago.  And so why is an old book about an annoyance that your
 mother called the grippe -- and that you got over in a few
 days, seldom the worse for wear --o ur topic for this
 morning?  
    Because the flu changed the course of history.  Because the
 number of people who died of the flu in 1918 far surpassed
 the combined battle deaths of World War I, World War II,
 Korea, Vietnam, Grenada and Panama.  Because the world in
 which this book was originally written, only a few years ago
 -- a world in which young people didn't live under the terror
 of serious mass medical vulnerability -- has changed,
 utterly.
    When "America's Forgotten Pandemic:  The Influenza of 1918"
 (Cambridge, 337 pages, $39.50 hardcover, $12.95 paperback)
 first was published, says Alfred Crosby in a preface to the
 new edition of his book, "the loss of a 21-year-old to
 communicable disease in the U. S. seemed as likely as his
 being hit by a falling tree."  Now, in the age of AIDS, we are
 at least cured of our medical hubris.
    The influenza of 1918, often complicated with pneumonia,
 killed more people faster than any other disease in history.
 In London, 700 people died in a three-week period in July.
 That same month there were 53,000 cases in Switzerland.  But
 the disease wasn't confined to Europeans or to the principals
 in the Great War.  Before the pandemic was over, two-thirds of
 the people of Sierra Leone were stricken.
    This was the disease that affected the war and the peace.
 Gen.  John Pershing called for American reinforcements in late
 September, but the Army, by then recognizing influenza as an
 enemy in its own right, canceled an October draft call for
 142,000 men and quarantined the camps set up to hold them.
 Mr. Crosby, professor of American Studies at the University
 of Texas, raises the question of whether President Woodrow
 Wilson -- and his vainly idealistic hopes for peace at
 Versailles -- fell victim to the flu, long before he
 collapsed during his effort to win Senate approval of the
 pact.
    This all occurred at a period when our storehouse of
 medical knowledge was far more modest.  Mr. Crosby, in fact,
 argues that the armed forces, unwittingly in most cases, did
 much to promote the pandemic.  "At the end of the last summer
 of World War I some 1.5 million American adults who were most
 perfectly qualified to cultivate the most virulent strain of
 influenza virus in history and its jackal bacteria were
 living cheek-by-jowl in a small number of military camps all
 over the nation, and large numbers of them were constantly
 traveling back and forth between these camps."
    Washington expressed its first fears about the disease on
 Sept. 11, but on the next day, 13 million men "of precisely
 the ages most likely to die" of the disease "lined up all
 over the U. S. and crammed into city halls, post offices and
 schoolhouses to register for the draft."
    The flu hit and took root in an era of mass gatherings.
 Men moved in crowded troop trains en route to crowded troop
 ships; by the time the 328th Labor battalion completed its
 journey from Louisiana to Newport News, scores had influenza.
 "When the trip started, the 328th was an asset," Mr. Crosby
 says.  "When it ended, the 328th was a liability."
    The American civilian population was anything but immune.
 Some 5,100 died in a two-week period in October in
 Philadelphia alone, where a shortage of embalmers and grave
 diggers threatened to make the situation even worse.  San
 Francisco passed a law requiring "every person appearing on
 the public streets" to wear a mask "except for partaking of
 meals."  When the armistice was declared, celebrants in the
 Bay area wore crude masks.
    The struggle against the disease was a war of attrition by
 itself.  The disease was so debilitating that it counted among
 its victims a 25-year-old Eskimo, Split the Wind, who was
 known as the best musher in Alaskan history and who was so
 robust that he had survived in the deep Arctic by eating the
 lacings of his snowshoes.
    In all, Mr. Crosby believes the flu killed many more than
 the 21 million deaths attributed to it.  "It was a demographic
 catastrophe," he writes, "comparable in its destruction of
 human life in this century only with World War II.  "
    But for all Mr. Crosby's vivid detail, the flu escaped
 attention for many months in 1918 and is all but forgotten
 today.  During the war, when communication was restricted and
 often impeded by censorship, the influenza was overshadowed
 by reports of heroism and battle.  Today, Mr. Crosby argues,
 the average college graduate knows more about the Black Death
 of the 14th century than the flu pandemic.
    Now, of course, AIDS has made this story more urgent.
 "Scientists know amazingly more about molecular biology,
 pathogens and immunology than they did 15 or 20 years ago,"
 says Mr. Crosby, "but the bad guys, the pathogens,
 particularly the newly recognized ones, seem to the general
 public to have become nastier faster than scientists have
 become smarter."  The lesson here is not only one of history,
 but of humility.
    ---
    Mr. Shribman covers national politics in the Journal's
 Washington bureau.

[This article is made available here by Dow Jones Co. for the 
personal and non-commercial use of callers to this bbs, in the 
hope that it will be of some help to those who are suffering 
from the disease and others who are seeking to help them.]