…on a chicken farm?
That’s what the author of a book I read (The Great Influenza) when it came out 15 years ago contends.
I read that there too. (Great book by the way, as was “The Great Mortality” by the same author.)
Apparently Kansas is one of three suspects with China and France being the other two if I remember correctly. I don’t think we’ll ever know for sure.
Yes, I was thinking of the idea that the original animal/human mutation emerged in a military base in Etaples
Wikipedia has hypotheses about the source. Also, the common name: Because of World War I, news about the flu was scarce in most of Europe and the US, except in neutral Spain, so that’s where the most flu stories came from.
Ironically, one place we can be pretty sure it did NOT originate was Spain.
“In early 1918, the virus—which would eventually kill more people than all the military deaths of both World Wars combined—infected a large number of men at Camp Funston, an Army base in Kansas, and spread rapidly to other bases. As it slipped into the civilian world, public-health officials “lied for the war effort, for the propaganda machine that Wilson had created,” John M. Barry writes, in his detailed history of the pandemic, “The Great Influenza.” A Navy ship carried the virus to Philadelphia, and sailors started dying, but the city’s public-health director, a political appointee named Wilmer Krusen, dismissed it as “old-fashioned influenza or grip.” As the toll grew, Krusen assured the public that the city was on track to “nip the epidemic in the bud,” and some news organizations became allies in maintaining the façade. A headline in the Inquirer declared, “Scientific Nursing Halting Epidemic,” when, in fact, local hospitals were collapsing under a crush of new cases. The week of that headline, forty-five hundred and ninety-seven people in Philadelphia died of the flu.”
Apparently news was “scarce” in the U.S. because of a concerted effort by the Woodrow Wilson administration (i.e. propaganda). Other governments did this as well.
Here is the first in a series of videos about the 1918 flu. It says the virus originated in China and spread to North America via soldiers who were crossing Canada.
I don’t know if we should be taking history lessons from a bunch of gamers.
Did you watch the videos?
You sound like a conspiracy theorist.
That said, I did watch a little. Why do they start with the second wave (Massachusetts) rather than the first wave (Kansas)?